The Caine Mutiny Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 126 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Caine Mutiny.
Study Guide

The Caine Mutiny Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 126 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Caine Mutiny.
This section contains 1,711 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Caine Mutiny Study Guide

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay, she analyzes Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny as a 'hostile text'-a novel that resists critical and analytic interpretive strategies.

The Caine Mutiny opens with a textual artifact- a page torn from the book of Navy Regulations which contains the articles relating to relief of a commanding officer. It closes with another- the "torn paper" of parade confetti which "brushed the face of the last captain of the Caine." Between these ripped paper bookends lies a densely intertextual work which is layered with deliberate echoes of a multitude of canonical texts-the most obvious being The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby-Dick, and the book of Genesis-and contains scattered references to dozens of others. Though this would seem, at first glance, to mark it as a novel that invites literary interpretation, nothing could be...

(read more)

This section contains 1,711 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Caine Mutiny Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
The Caine Mutiny from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.