Pierre Aronnax - Tumblr Posts

i talk at length about it in my video essay i'm working on, but without spoiling too much about that and/or the book itself, this bit in 20k is why the book NEEDS aronnax as the narrator. aronnax isn't just A sheltered white european academic, he's Symbolic Of sheltered white european academics. for all his talk about logic and science and being above emotion, he's still completely overtaken by victorian concepts of race, colonialism, and eurocentrism. and again without spoiling everything, nemo is driven by his incredibly complex relation/opposition to exactly that, and exactly the type of person aronnax is and represents. for how close they are the rest of the time, chapters like these force aronnax to show his hand and reveal why he can never truly meet nemo where he is.