The Negative Halt of the Sub Sub

Herman Melville's Moby Dick was not received particularly well after it was published. The harder he works, the less the thanks for his work - that could also be a Melville's experience. This narrator figure thinks they're amusing and bizarre and ridiculous in a way. And as he looks at these different events, he has a human reaction to that. He's not the kind of narrator who is distant from the thing he's narrating. That emotion comes into how he tells the story.