The Ramadan

Chapter 17 pauses the movement toward boarding the Pequod to test how Ishmael and Queequeg live with religious difference. Its action spans a vigil, an anxious interruption, and an unsuccessful argument, before the companions resume their shared journey. Ishmael’s concern is genuine: he breaks down the door because he fears Queequeg has suffered a stroke, then covers him with his bearskin jacket against the cold. Yet affection does not produce understanding. Queequeg’s silence makes his observance inaccessible to a narrator eager to explain it. The concluding breakfast and companionable departure establish that agreement is not necessary for their relationship to continue; the unresolved disagreement is absorbed into ordinary shared life.

The narration turns restricted knowledge into farce. Ishmael’s view through the keyhole is only a “crooked and sinister one,” a literal limitation that also captures his distorted interpretation of the silence. Repeated cries, abrupt dialogue, and frantic movement build toward the anticlimax of Queequeg sitting “altogether cool and self-collected.” Mrs. Hussey’s mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet anchor the supposed emergency in comic domestic detail, while her concern for damaged property competes with concern for life. Her proposed prohibition, “no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;”, absurdly treats death as another household nuisance. Against everyone else’s verbal and bodily agitation, Queequeg’s stillness becomes the scene’s organizing contrast.

Ishmael’s declarations of tolerance repeatedly expose their own limits. He urges charity toward “Presbyterians and Pagans alike,” but calls Queequeg’s beliefs absurd and eventually lectures him on religion’s alleged submission to “Hygiene and common sense.” His argument makes bodily comfort the measure of spiritual value, culminating in the comic claim that hell originates in an “undigested apple-dumpling.” Queequeg’s cheerful emergence from the vigil complicates Ishmael’s assumption that the practice is merely torment. More decisively, Queequeg returns the narrator’s pity with “condescending concern and compassion.” This reversal makes religious superiority reciprocal: each regards the other as sensible yet spiritually mistaken, while their limited communication prevents either perspective from becoming authoritative.

Food connects the chapter’s religious argument to its unsettling treatment of cultural judgment. Ishmael assumes that fasting impoverishes thought, but his question about digestion prompts Queequeg’s account of a victory feast involving slain enemies. The narrator’s shudder interrupts his confident instruction, exposing a difference that friendly intimacy cannot simply erase. Yet his elaboration compares the distributed bodies to “Christmas turkeys,” bringing an apparently alien practice into the language of familiar festive generosity without cancelling its horror. The chapter thus alternates between estrangement and recognition rather than offering uncomplicated tolerance. Its final image of the companions “picking our teeth with halibut bones” returns both men to a shared bodily routine after their competing spiritual explanations have failed.