20000 leagues under the sea book report
Chambers Apr 18, Reviews 8 comments. Professor Aronnax, his faithful servant, Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner, Ned Land, begin an extremely hazardous voyage to rid the seas of a little-known and terrifying sea monster. Some Context What must it have been like to be alive in s? New empires and militarism were arising in Europe and Asia, and the United States was recovering from a grueling civil war. Despite the political instability, it was a time of revolutionary innovation.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Its depiction of Captain Nemo's underwater ship, the Nautilus , is regarded as ahead of its time, since it accurately describes many features of today's submarines , which in the s were comparatively primitive vessels.
A model of the French submarine Plongeur launched in figured at the Exposition Universelle , where Jules Verne examined it [2] and was inspired by it [3] [4] when penning his novel. The title refers to the distance traveled under the various seas and not to any depth attained, since 20, leagues 80, km is nearly twice the circumference of the Earth; [6] the greatest depth reached in the novel is four leagues.
The book employs metric leagues, which are four kilometers each. During the year , ships of various nationalities sight a mysterious sea monster , which, it's later suggested, might be a gigantic narwhal. The U. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and the story's narrator, is in town at the time and receives a last-minute invitation to join the expedition; he accepts. Canadian whaler and master harpooner Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful manservant Conseil are also among the participants.
The expedition leaves Manhattan's 34th St. Pier aboard the U. After a five-month search ending off Japan, the frigate locates and attacks the monster, which damages the ship's rudder.
The three protagonists are hurled into the sea and ultimately climb onto the monster itself, which they are startled to find is a futuristic submarine. They wait on the deck of the vessel until morning, when they're captured, hauled inside, and introduced to the submarine's mysterious manufacturer and commander, Captain Nemo. The rest of the novel describes the protagonists' adventures aboard the Nautilus , which was built in secrecy and now roams the seas beyond the reach of land-based governments.
In self-imposed exile, Captain Nemo seems to have a dual motivation: a quest for scientific knowledge and a desire to take revenge on terrestrial civilization. Nemo explains that his submarine is electrically powered and can conduct advanced marine research; he also tells his new passengers that his secret existence means he can't let them leave — they must remain on board permanently.
Professor Aronnax and Conseil are enthralled by the prospect of undersea exploration, but Ned Land increasingly hungers to escape. They visit many ocean regions, some factual and others fictitious. The travelers view coral formations, sunken vessels from the battle of Vigo Bay , the Antarctic ice barrier, the Transatlantic telegraph cable , and the legendary underwater realm of Atlantis.
The passengers also don diving suits , hunt sharks and other marine fauna with air guns in the underwater forests of Crespo Island, and also attend an undersea funeral for a crew member who died during a mysterious collision experienced by the Nautilus. When the submarine returns to the Atlantic Ocean , a school of "poulpes" attacks the vessel and kills a crewman.
In French "poulpe" is a generic term for a cephalopod, such as a cuttlefish , octopus , etc. Verne's text specifies that the monster in this case is "un calmar de dimensions colossales", "a squid of colossal dimensions", i.
The novel's later pages suggest that Captain Nemo went into undersea exile after his homeland was conquered and his family slaughtered by a powerful imperialist nation. Following the episode of the devilfish, Nemo largely avoids Aronnax, who begins to side with Ned Land. Ultimately, the Nautilus is attacked by a warship from the mysterious nation that has caused Nemo such suffering. Carrying out his quest for revenge, Nemo — whom Aronnax dubs an "archangel of hatred" — rams the ship below her waterline and sends her to the bottom, much to the professor's horror.
Afterward, Nemo kneels before a portrait of his deceased wife and children, then sinks into a deep depression. Circumstances aboard the submarine change drastically: watches are no longer kept, and the vessel wanders about aimlessly. Ned becomes so reclusive that Conseil fears for the harpooner's life.
One morning, however, Ned announces that they're in sight of land and have a chance to escape. Professor Aronnax is more than ready to leave Captain Nemo, who now horrifies him. Yet he's still drawn to the man, fears that Nemo's very presence could weaken his resolve, and therefore avoids contact with the captain. Before their departure, however, the professor eavesdrops on Nemo and overhears him calling out in anguish, "O almighty God!
But as they board the submarine's skiff, they realize that the Nautilus has seemingly blundered into the ocean's deadliest whirlpool, the Moskenstraumen , more commonly known as the "Maelstrom". Nevertheless they manage to escape and find refuge on an island off the coast of Norway. The submarine's ultimate fate, however, remains unknown. Captain Nemo's assumed name recalls Homer's Odyssey , a Greek epic poem. In The Odyssey , Odysseus encounters the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus in the course of his wanderings.
In the Latin translation of the Odyssey , this pseudonym is rendered as " Nemo ", which also translates as "No man" or "No one". Like Captain Nemo, Odysseus wanders the seas in exile though only for 10 years and similarly grieves the tragic deaths of his crewmen. Verne's text repeatedly mentions U. Naval Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury , an actual oceanographer who investigated the winds, seas, and currents, collected samples from the depths, and charted the world's oceans.
Maury was internationally famous, and Verne may have known of his French ancestry. In possibly the novel's most famous episode, the above-cited battle with a school of giant squid , one of the monsters captures a crew member. Reflecting on the battle in the next chapter, Aronnax writes: "To convey such sights, it would take the pen of our most renowned poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea. Certainly Verne was influenced by Hugo's novel, and, in penning this variation on its octopus encounter, he may have intended the symbol to also take in the Revolutions of Other symbols and themes pique modern critics.
Margaret Drabble , for instance, argues that Verne's masterwork also anticipated the ecology movement and influenced French avant-garde imagery. While in Mediterranean waters, the captain provides financial support to rebels resisting Ottoman rule during the Cretan Revolt of — , proving to Professor Aronnax that he hadn't severed all relations with terrestrial mankind.
In another episode, Nemo rescues an East Indian pearl diver from a shark attack, then gives the fellow a pouch full of pearls, more than the man could have gathered after years of his hazardous work. Nemo remarks later that the diver, as a native of British Colonial India, "lives in the land of the oppressed". Indeed, the novel has an under-the-counter political vision, hinted at in the character and background of Captain Nemo himself.
In the novel's initial drafts, the mysterious captain was a Polish nobleman , whose family and homeland were slaughtered by Russian forces during the Polish January Uprising of However, these specifics were suppressed during the editing stages at the insistence of Verne's publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel , believed responsible by today's scholars for many modifications of Verne's original manuscripts.
At the time France was a putative ally of the Russian Empire , hence Hetzel demanded that Verne suppress the identity of Nemo's enemy, not only to avoid political complications but also to avert lower sales should the novel appear in Russian translation. Hetzel was a thoroughly commercial publisher Five years later, and again at Hetzel's insistence, Captain Nemo was revived and revamped for another Verne novel The Mysterious Island. It alters the captain's nationality from Polish to East Indian, changing him into a fictional descendant of Tipu Sultan , Muslim ruler of Mysore who resisted the expansionism of the British East India Company.
Thus Nemo's unnamed enemy is converted into France's old antagonist, the British Empire. Born as an East Indian aristocrat, one Prince Dakkar, Nemo participated in a major 19th century uprising, the Indian Rebellion of , ultimately quashed by the United Kingdom.
After his loved ones were slain by the British, Nemo fled beneath the seas, then made a final reappearance in the later novel's concluding pages. Verne took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines , built in by Robert Fulton , who also invented the first commercially successful steamboat.
Fulton named his submarine after a marine mollusk, the chambered nautilus. As noted above, Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the Exposition Universelle , which guided him in his development of the novel's Nautilus. The diving gear used by passengers on the Nautilus is presented as a combination of two existing systems: 1 the surface supplied [11] hardhat suit, which was fed oxygen from the shore through tubes; 2 a later, self-contained apparatus designed by Benoit Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze in Their invention featured tanks fastened to the back, which supplied air to a facial mask via the first-known demand regulator.
Its air tanks could hold only thirty atmospheres, however Nemo claims that his futuristic adaptation could do far better: "The Nautilus' s pumps allow me to store air under considerable pressure While The Mysterious Island attempts to provide additional background on Nemo or Prince Dakkar , it's muddled by irreconcilable chronological discrepancies between the two books and even within The Mysterious Island itself.
Verne returned to the theme of an outlaw submarine captain in his much later Facing the Flag This novel's chief villain, Ker Karraje, is a simply an unscrupulous pirate acting purely for personal gain, completely devoid of the saving graces that gave Captain Nemo some nobility of character. Like Nemo, Ker Karraje plays "host" to unwilling French guests — but unlike Nemo, who manages to elude all pursuers — Karraje's criminal career is decisively thwarted by the combination of an international task force and the resistance of his French captives.
Though also widely published and translated, Facing the Flag never achieved the lasting popularity of Twenty Thousand Leagues. Closer in approach to the original Nemo — though offering less detail and complexity of characterization — is the rebel aeronaut Robur in Robur the Conqueror and its sequel Master of the World. Instead of the sea, Robur's medium is the sky: in these two novels he develops a pioneering helicopter and later a seaplane on wheels.
Mercier cut nearly a quarter of Verne's French text and committed hundreds of translating errors, sometimes drastically distorting Verne's original including uniformly mistranslating the French scaphandre — properly "diving suit" — as "cork-jacket", following a long-obsolete usage as "a type of lifejacket ".
Some of these distortions may been perpetrated for political reasons, such as Mercier's omitting the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of Nemo's stateroom, a collection originally including Daniel O'Connell [14] among other international figures.
Nevertheless Mercier's text became the standard English translation, and some later "re-translations" continued to recycle its mistakes including its mistranslation of the novel's title, which, in French, actually means Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
However, in Anthony Bonner published a fresh, essentially complete translation of Verne's masterwork for Bantam Classics. A significant modern revision of Mercier's translation appeared in , prepared by Walter James Miller and published by Washington Square Press. Mercier's errors were further corrected in a fresh re-examination of the sources along with a new translation, again by Walter James Miller but in collaboration with fellow Vernian Frederick Paul Walter.
Butcher includes detailed notes, an extensive bibliography, appendices and a wide-ranging introduction studying the novel from a literary perspective. In particular, his original research on the two manuscripts studies the radical changes to the plot and to the character of Nemo urged on Verne by his original publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. In a notorious article, Theodore L.
Thomas denounced the novel, alleging that "there is not a single bit of valid speculation" in the book and that "none of its predictions has come true". He described its depictions of Nemo's diving gear, underwater activities, and the Nautilus as "pretty bad, behind the times even for In none of these technical situations did Verne take advantage of knowledge readily available to him at the time.
A story emerges that sweeps incredulity before it". Today, however, Thomas's observations are held in low regard, having been comprehensively debunked in the Naval Institute Press edition cited above.
Thomas had made the fundamental blunder of accepting the original translation's errors and deletions without referencing Verne's French. As the Naval Institute translation documents, every detail denounced by Thomas was actually perpetrated by Verne's first English translator, Lewis Page Mercier.
Captain Nemo's nationality is presented in many feature film and video realizations as European. Nemo also appears as an East Indian in the silent film version of the novel which adds elements from The Mysterious Island and later in both the graphic novel and the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
In the Disney adaptation, he's played by British actor James Mason , with — as in the novel itself — no mention of his being East Indian. Disney's filmscript elaborates on background hints in Verne's original: in an effort to acquire Nemo's scientific secrets, his wife and son were tortured to death by an unnamed government overseeing the fictional prison camp of Rorapandi. This is the captain's motivation for sinking warships in the film. Also, Nemo's submarine confines her activities to a defined, circular section of the Pacific Ocean, unlike the movements of the original Nautilus.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see 20, Leagues Under the Sea disambiguation.
by Jules Verne. the author's purpose is to entertain us with an intrusting story. the main setting of this book is mostly on a submarine. 20, Leagues Under the Sea is a science fiction novel by French author Jules Verne, first published in French in Before publication as a book, 20,
Its depiction of Captain Nemo's underwater ship, the Nautilus , is regarded as ahead of its time, since it accurately describes many features of today's submarines , which in the s were comparatively primitive vessels. A model of the French submarine Plongeur launched in figured at the Exposition Universelle , where Jules Verne examined it [2] and was inspired by it [3] [4] when penning his novel. The title refers to the distance traveled under the various seas and not to any depth attained, since 20, leagues 80, km is nearly twice the circumference of the Earth; [6] the greatest depth reached in the novel is four leagues. The book employs metric leagues, which are four kilometers each.
Main idea of story: One of the first science fiction adventure novels! This classic, first published in , takes place in the deep watery depths and the famous Nautilus, a submarine lead by Captain Nemo!
The story opens in the year Everyone in Europe and America is talking about a mysterious creature that has been sinking ships. Finally, the United States government decides to intervene and commissions the Abraham Lincoln to capture and identify the creature.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Summary, Quotes & Characters
These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. There is a sinister and monstrous narwhal beneath the ocean; this is confirmed independently by ships from a number of different nations. The United States government quickly puts together an expedition of experts who they believe will be able to hunt down and kill the monster. The expedition is to be led by renowned Canadian whaler Ned Land , who is also a master harpoonist. He is joined by Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist who is added to the expedition at the last minute when it is learned that he is in New York City for personal reasons. His faithful bagman, Consell, will travel too.
A book for the beach: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
On 10 March , Jules Verne was excited. He was deep in the first volume of his latest book — whose working title had recently changed from Journey Under the Waters to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — and it was going well. I've never held a better thing in my hands. I can't think of a better thing to read on the sands. As a classic it has aged wonderfully well: it is escapist fun, but still retains its literary and scientific significance. To dismiss it as simply an adventure story does it a disservice. Yes, Verne's oceanic journey around the world is a ripping yarn, but it is also an eerie tale of isolation and madness, packed full with geographical and scientific accuracies that make the fantastic uncomfortably believable. The narrator, oceanic scientist Professor Pierre Aronnax is on a mission to determine the animal or otherwise nature of an unknown being attacking ships around the world. Aronnax, along with his faithful servant Conseil and the boisterous harpooner Ned Land, are kidnapped by their target, a horned submarine called the Nautilus. Their captor is the mysterious Captain Nemo, an intelligent, quiet man who hates all who live on land for reasons mostly unexplained, unless you read Verne's The Mysterious Island.
Proffesor Arronac is very excited to solve the mystery of the huge monster ravaging the ocean with his friend Conseil. He echoed talking to Captain Nemo about his ocean world and earned his trust for a while.
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Book Report: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. A mysterious beast is attacking ships the world over. The famous oceanographer, Pierre Aronnax, thinks that the beast is a gargantuan narwhale. You know, a marine animal with a freaking sword on its head. No big deal. So, Aronnax is invited on a special mission by the U. After weeks of searching, the ship finally encounters the beast, but it's simply no match for it. Aronnax is thrown overboard when the monster rams the ship, which leads his servant Conseil to go in after him. The two struggle to get back onboard the Lincoln , only to end up on the deck of some other vessel. All is not well on the new ship. Soon after, they are visited by their crazy cap'n, who reveals that he can speak all of the languages that they speak—French, German, English, and Latin—even though he pretended not to at first.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Summary
Coronavirus response: We have free resources to support you through the pandemic. Skip to Content. Following the adventures of the Nautilus and its crew involves physics, biology, engineering, and a lot of philosophizing. Some messages seem remarkably modern -- for example, Aronnax observes on several occasions that man's tendency to hunt sea creatures to extinction is going to result in toxic, dead oceans. The question of Captain Nemo's passion for revenge and whether it's justified remains unanswered.
