411 REFERENCE · Wiktionary
Queequeg
Reference material by Wiktionary contributors. This retains its source identity and is not 411 news reporting.
English
Etymology
en
Proper noun
A fictional sidekick character in American author Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, the multiracial tattooed Polynesian cannibal prince and skilled harpooner who became a whaler on European vessels out of wanderlust. Queequeg practices an alien fictional religion and constantly engages in feats of bravado intimidating to the white and ethnically-European protagonist but befriends him and shows no resentment at treatment by white societies. Melville's text describes him as “George Washington cannibalistically developed”.
en Ray B. Browne Rosemary Herbert Bonaparte, Napoleon https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195072396.001.0001/acref-9780195072396-e-0069 The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing 1999 w:Oxford University Press 9780195072396 10.1093/acref/9780195072396.001.0001 Half British and half Aboriginal, Bony is in his early to middle forties. Like Herman Melville's Queequeg before him, Bony benefits from his mixture of races.
en Joyce A. Rowe Jay Parini Philip W. Leininger Herman Melville's Moby-Dick https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195156539.001.0001/acref-9780195156539-e-0189 The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature 2004 w:Oxford University Press 9780195156539 10.1093/acref/9780195156539.001.0001 As they stroll out together they evoke stares, not because of Queequeg's outlandish tattooing (since New Bedford's whaling port draws a worldwide sailor population), but because of the easy companionship of a dark-skinned man with a white. Melville seems to raise the question, What might America have become if the European encounter with the wilderness had been directed by truly humane, universal values?
Noun
A person, fictional character, or other foil who literally or symbolically fulfills one or more of the roles Queequeg played in Moby-Dick such as the noble savage, de Entwicklungsroman guru or exemplar, or racially-inflected spear carrier role.
en John Anthony Whitehead; Morgan David Enoch Do We Need Psychiatric Hospitals? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4994583/ Mental Health w:London National Association for Mental Health 1969 0025-9632 8147762204 28907967 28 (Autumn) 22–24 This type of programme envisaged might do something towards combating the 'Queequeg Syndrome', which is an induced psychiatric illness, due to the patient being treated as abnormal. The cause is similar to that of institutional neurosis, but it affects patients outside hospital and is due to the attitudes of family, general practitioner, community workers and society. The patient is now expected to be more normal than normal.
en w:Richard Rodriguez Profession Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez https://archive.org/details/hungerofmemory00rich w:Boston w:David R. Godine, Publisher 1982 741720494 0879234180 81081810 162 After that I was regarded as comic. I became a ‘coconut’—someone brown on the outside, white on the inside. I was the bleached academic—more white than the anglo professors. In my classes several students glared at me, clearly seeing in me the person they feared ever becoming. Who was I, after all, but some comic Queequeg, holding close to my breast a reliquary containing the white powder of a dead European civilization?
en Suzanne B. Stein The Pusher and the Sufferer: An Unsentimental Reading of Moby Dick 2000 Garland Publishing 36 0815339593 00044236 For Ishmael, unparented and self-abhoring, accession requires that he find, then lose himself in a Queequeg, preparatory to finding, then losing himself in an Ahab, both of whom he will, at the end of the adventure, kill.
Derived terms
en Queequeg syndrome
en Fictional characters Moby-Dick Multiracial People Stock characters
Spanish
Proper noun
m
a fictional character in American author Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick
es Jacinto Antón En el corazón de la ballena In the heart of the whale El País https://web.archive.org/web/20151123003627/http://elpais.com/m/elpais/2015/11/18/eps/1447862959_956549.html 2015-11-23 2015-11-21 Reportaje Pero la palabra, me puntualizó la taxista, no hace referencia a un descanso muy profundo, ni a la arriesgada vida del ballenero, ni al ataúd de Queequeg, sino que es el apellido de una de las grandes familias pioneras del viejo Nantucket, ese Gotha de los mares—los Starbuck, Marcy, Coleman, Folgers—que maridó el coraje y el negocio, el arpón y el cuaquerismo, y se construyó un provechoso reino sobre el ámbar gris y el espermaceti.