Cultural References and Literary Allusions
- Queequeg is a character in Moby-Dick, and the face of Herman Melville appears on the submarine's uniforms.
- In a Rosetta stone.
- Sunny uses foreign words in this book:
- Yom Huledet, which means birthday in Hebrew.
- Shalom, which means peace and is used for hello or goodbye in Hebrew.
- Cuisi- Sunny was about to say "cuisine" which means kitchen in French.
- Three poems are mentioned involving the Verse Fluctuation Declaration:
- Robert Browning's My Last Duchess
- Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter
- T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
Read more about this topic: The Grim Grotto
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or literary:
“Somehow we have been taught to believe that the experiences of girls and women are not important in the study and understanding of human behavior. If we know men, then we know all of humankind. These prevalent cultural attitudes totally deny the uniqueness of the female experience, limiting the development of girls and women and depriving a needy world of the gifts, talents, and resources our daughters have to offer.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)