Foreword
The Voyage of the Narwhal is a novel of polar
exploration: about the men who sailed north in the mid-nineteenth
century at the height of America's great romance with
the Arctic; about the Inuit encountered in a frozen
landscape, and about the women left behind, making journeys
of the imagination as they waited at home. Through their
encounters with the Arctic, the characters also explore
ideas of race, culture, and evolution that were current
just before the Civil War. And they confront more timeless
issues as well: the costs of obsession, the varieties
of love and of meaningful work, what it means to be
human.
"Writing The Voyage of the Narwhal took me on
an unexpected journey," Andrea Barrett says. "While
writing my previous book, Ship Fever, and researching
the stories of Irish emigrants on their way to Canada,
I read a few pages about a ship that was sunk by drifting
ice floes off Newfoundland. That image—the jagged ice,
the hole in the ship, the people sinking helplessly—flung
me back to the territory of a childhood obsession with
polar explorers. What was it that had drawn me so deeply
into those stories? The ice, the snow, the winter—long
nights and the days that last for months: Why had those
tales gripped me so? On Cape Cod, where I grew up, I
hid under bridges and up in trees and in hollows at
the base of sand dunes, reading about Peary and Nansen
and Shackleton, shutting out everything else in my world;
longing so fiercely to be those explorers and not grasping
for years that they were men, and I wasn't; that the
forces and desires driving them could never be mine,
and were not all noble; and that what separated me from
them was not just gender but time and space and politics
and the changing nature of the world. Yet something
real joined me to them as well: an escape from the pettiness
of the self, and a longing to embrace the whole world.
Somewhere in my teens that obsession went underground.
Then it resurfaced, two decades later, altered but stronger
than ever.
"Ned Kynd, a minor character in Ship Fever, continued
to haunt me long after I'd finished writing about him
and his family: What might have happened to him, I wondered,
after he was separated from his sister at Grosse Isle
and shipped upriver? At first I envisioned a companion
novella, something short and largely about Ned. But
almost as soon as I started work I realized that I'd
entered an imaginary world very much shaped by my own
Arctic obsessions, and that this was going to be a full-length
novel.
"I embarked on this novel almost by accident; so, too,
does the American naturalist who became its protagonist
set off almost accidentally for the north. It's hard
for us to imagine, now, how exciting those Arctic expeditions
were; they caused a fever resembling the early days
of the space program. The commanders of these expeditions
were the astronauts of their time, celebrated with banner
headlines and huge parades. When one of the most famous—Elisha
Kent Kane, who appears in the background of this novel—died,
all of America mourned him at a funeral exceeded only,
a few years later, by Lincoln's.
"My naturalist isn't one of those actual Arctic explorers,
though; he's an invented character, and all his companions
and their expedition are also invented. You might wonder
why I'd want to invent yet another expedition, when
the late 1840s and l850s were so rich with actual expeditions.
One reason is that no single expedition encompassed
all I wanted to say about the nature of exploring in
that time and place. Another, perhaps more important
reason is that only by inventing an expedition, and
following where that led me, could I share in the process
of discovery those real explorers experienced. It was
a strange, secret pleasure to take material so far removed
from my own quiet life, and to remake the traditional
matter of a quest narrative in my own way."
Discussion
Questions
1. By today's standards, the crew of the Narwhal sailed
north with almost nothing: no radio, cellular phone,
or electronic equipment; no reliable navigational
devices; inadequate food and clothes; maps with big
blanks of uncharted space. Compare this kind of nineteenth-century
exploration with "adventure travel" today. How do
these experiences differ, both for the adventurers
and for those waiting for them at home? Do you think
travel in the mid-nineteenth century took a different
kind of courage?
2. Many of the characters here might be described
as obsessed, although the nature of their obsessions
differs. What is driving each of the central characters?
Is the search for glory and recognition different
from the search for knowledge? How would you relate
these characters' goals and aspirations to those of
people who set off now on such purposefully dangerous
adventures as crossing Antarctica, skiing over the
North Pole, or climbing Mount Everest?
3. All fiction is in some way about the encounter
of the self and the other. Our ideas of "otherness"
though, vary with culture and time; mid-nineteenth-century
American and European explorers, for example, sometimes
described their encounters with people from other
cultures in pejorative terms; as if those people were
not fully human. And few written records from the
period tell the other side of the story—how the Inuit,
for example, perceived the strangers stumbling into
their land. Who does Erasmus perceive as the other?
Is he in some way a foreigner not just to the Inuit,
but to his own culture? What about Alexandra and Zeke—or
about Annie's and Tom's relationship to their own
culture, and the other culture they briefly experience?
4. Compare the responses of Zeke and Erasmus to the
Arctic landscape and the Inuit. Can you describe the
ways in which each makes use of what he's seen and
learned?
5. What is the function of the quotations from Pliny
the Elder's Natural History, which Erasmus remembers
his father reading: Are these linked to the discussions,
late in the novel, about race and the human species?
6. How do you view the relationship of Erasmus and
Dr. Boerhaave? Toward each other they are tender,
respectful, supportive, even loving; the best of friends.
In another century, in other circumstances, do you
think their feelings toward each other might have
expressed themselves in a different way?
7. Initially, the central women characters—Alexandra,
Lavinia, Annie—seem to be in the background of the
novel. Does this reflect a sense of what was permitted
to women then? Compare their relationships with each
other to those among the central male characters.
8. Describe the journey that Alexandra makes during
the course of the novel. How does it parallel the
more visible, exterior journey made by Erasmus and
the crew of the Narwhal? Does she find a form of freedom
within the constraints imposed on her by her class
and gender?
9. Annie makes a journey as well—in its own way as
profound and daring as that of the novel's male voyagers,
and with deeper consequences. Do you think she's aware
of herself as a kind of explorer? What does she see
as her task when she agrees to leave her home with
Zeke?
10. Why is it so important to Lavinia that Erasmus
guard Zeke from harm on his journey north—and why
does she feel so betrayed when he fails? What do her
responses say about the role of marriage for women
in her place and time?
11. Letters, journals, and diaries play a crucial
role in this novel—as they did in the lives of many
educated nineteenth-century people. What do they contribute
to the novel? Do they reveal aspects of Erasmus, Zeke,
Alexandra, dr. Boerhaave, and Ned we wouldn't otherwise
know?
12. In Erasmus's first journal entry, describing the
scene at the dock earlier that day, he writes: "But
when I describe it in words one thing follows another
and everything's shaped by my single pair of eyes,
my single voice. I wish I could show it through a
fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective
to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture
might appear and not just my version of it." How does
the structure of the novel as a whole mirror that
initial statement? Did it seem important to you that
the novel incorporate many viewpoints? How would the
novel have been different if it had mirrored the published
journals of the real nineteenth-century explorers
and been written solely in Erasmus's voice—or, for
that matter, in Zeke's?
13. The epigraphs heading each of the chapters are
from nineteenth-century texts, which the characters
might have been reading. Take a closer look at these:
Do we read them differently now than the characters
would have read them then? Now take another look at
the opening epigraph, which is from a text written
exactly a century after the events in the novel and
is about an antithetical landscape. Why do you think
the author chose this? What is she asking you to think
about?
Praise
for The Voyage of the Narwhal
"Barrett delivers a stunning novel in which a meticulous
grasp of historical and natural detail, insight into
character and pulse-pounding action are integrated
into a dramatic adventure story with deep moral resonance.
. . . The extremes of both human behavior and nature
. . . are described with an accuracy that makes one
forget that this is not a memoir but a work of the
imagination"—Publishers Weekly
"Barrett's impeccably researched and stunningly written
tale of a star-crossed Arctic voyage—a logical successor
to such earlier fiction as The Forms of Water
(1993) and the National Book Award-winning Ship
Fever—is, simply, one of the best novels of
the decade. . . . The intellectual range exhibited
by this magnificent novel places its author in the
rarefied company of great contemporary encyclopedic
writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, and Harry Mulisch."
—Kirkus Reviews
Also
by Andrea Barrett
Lucid Stars, paper, 1988, Delta
Secret Harmonies, paper, 1990, Washington Square
Press
The Middle Kingdom, paper, 1992, Washington
Square Press
The Forms of Water, paper, 1994, Washington
Square Press
Ship Fever, paper, 1997, W. W. Norton & Company
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