Ishmael wakes in the morning under the counterpane [an archaic term for a quilt or bed spread] at about daybreak.
“I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.”
The pattern of his bedfellow’s tattooed arm and that of the checkered counterpane brings him to a revere concerning his childhood.
“I had been cutting up some caper or other—I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother, who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,—my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed…”
Ishmael recounts his childhood ordeal as a prisoner in his bedroom, which culminated in a ghostly hand holding his belonging to a phantom seated at his bedside as he “…lay there frozen with the most awful fears.”
“Now take away the awful fear and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me.”
The date of this nightmare was June 21st, “the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.”
Ishmael continues with his account of Queequeg’s politeness, and compares his own gawking curiosity as a mark of civilized rudeness. After observing his roommate’s morning rituals he remarks, “…he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey-jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal’s baton.”
Together with the pale Usher who introduced the book, the haunting first chapter with its horrific edge, and the painting of the whale leaping the foundering ship in the lobby below, the reader might take Ishmael’s childhood punishment as a prediction of his whaling ordeal, and the phantom hand that shocked him awake in the darkness a premonition of Queequeg.
