his shipmates mistake the discarded jacket for a great white shark and harpoon it, sending it to a watery grave.

The symbolism of the color white, introduced in this novel in the form of the narrator's jacket, is more fully expanded upon in Moby-Dick, where it becomes an all-encompassing "blankness". The mixture of journalism, history, and fiction; the presentation of a sequence of striking characters; the metaphor of a sailing ship as the world in miniature, all prefigure Moby-Dick, his next novel.

White-Jacket and the log of the USS United States

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