This chapter is a short one, but reveals much about Melville’s view of whalemen. Like many people who are vastly talented in one area, they are lacking in others. Whalers, who hunt mighty beasts of the sea and sail for years around the Earth, are not terribly conversational around the breakfast table.

Queequeg, of course, is proud and comfortable even around this slightly awkward and quiet table. using his harpoon, he pulls the steaks over to him, and “eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his attention to beefsteaks, done rare.”

Many of the opening chapters of Moby-Dick have a singular focus on food. Sailors would often subsist on the same meal for months and years, so perhaps this is unsurprising for the opening chapters, set on shore. What people eat is perhaps as revealing as how they eat it. Here we see that rather than a table filled with bawdiness and sea-stories, the men are out of their element, and would perhaps prefer to be back at sea.

On an interesting side-note, while searching for information on the Breakfast chapter of Moby-Dick, I stumbled on the below video of a wave crashing into the Moby Dick restaurant in Santa Barbara.