This thesis is a close reading of —The Castaway— or Chapter 93 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; in which Pip, a small, Black cabin boy, is half-drowned in the heartless immensities of the open ocean. Pip is the novel's ultimate negation: he is the darkness in the bright, he is the coward in the whaleboat, and he is that alien but integral thing which structures the novel's systems of antithesis, while also providing them with their dynamism.

The novel's antitheses are persistently mediated by the figure termed the chiasmus within antithesis, which unlike a traditional chiasmus (—ABBA,—) follows the pattern —A AB BA B.— This form, in mediating between the A and the B, produces a supplement in the form of the negation. The focus on the supplement within systems of antitheses is derived from the theory of antithesis developed by Roland Barthes in S/Z, in which the body of the narrator extends beyond the closed system. The mediation of antitheses through the chiasmus of antithesis illustrates how binary systems of opposition are instantiated around bright, powerful, major authorities and are dissolved by their supplements—their counterposed dark sides.

The study begins by looking at how the body of a character-narrator mediates between antithetical textual elements by focusing on the opposition between hot and cold as well as the antithesis of significance and insignificance. The excesses produced by the mediation of these antitheses can then be seen to metaleptically rope the reader into the very systems they mediate.

While maintaining a degree of focus on the excess inherent in the antithesis, the second section turns toward the negation—the B-side—within the system of antithesis. The B-side is the defining feature of the chiasmus within antithesis. In this section, we see the intrinsic necessity of the cold, the dark, the black, the secondary, the minor, the objectified, the negligible, and the finite. This analysis proceeds along the lines of the gendered division of labor aboard the ship, that is between Ship-Keepers and Hunters.

Yet by emphasizing these aspects what we find is not simply the recognition of the larger structures of antithesis, we also witness the B-side surviving. Foremost of these elements is Pip, who emerges from narrative obscurity in Chapter 93 as the ultimate mediating element. His body is the Black, Queer, B-side par excellence, and his infinite soul is that mediatory excess, the negation of the negation, the castaway who lives on.

The third section of this thesis focuses on Pip, shown to be significant in his insignificance, major in his minority, brilliant in his blackness, and rational in his insanity; he emerges from the discourse, surpassing his minimization, and opens the space for narration from outside the position of the narrator. Pip's position at the flip—the center of the chiasmus of antithesis—produces the potential of a reading that flows from the margins inward, toward inmost vital centers, and out of which emerges the reader, yet —another lonely castaway.—