Cartography of the skin: Mapping Queequeg's identity through the eyes of others in Moby Dick

This dissertation deeply explores characterization within Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Specifically, this study focuses on the heavily tattooed character Queequeg and his treatment throughout the novel. Sentence by sentence, words and their connotations are analyzed to determine if words associated with Queequeg are positive, negative or neutral. The findings of the study lead to a gathering of words into groups, some groups having overlapping features. Word groups discovered and listed from negative to positive are titled: 1) violence 2) animal 3) negative wording 4) cultural ignorance 5) debatable language 6) positive/negative combinations 7) male gaze 8) Queequeg others 9) contextual dichotomy 10) neutral/factual 11) tone change 12) positive wording and 13) cultural understanding. When each word group is counted we find positive wording outnumbers negative wording by more than two-to-one