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Captain Nemo

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For other uses, see [[:the fictional character Captain Nemo]].

Captain Nemo is a fictional character featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874). "Nemo" is Latin for "no one".

Nemo, one of the most famous anti-heroes in fiction, is a mysterious figure. He identifies with the oppressed, and the soldiers of an aggressive and evil nation have apparently murdered his wife and children. Nemo is a scientific genius who roams the depths of the sea in his submarine, the Nautilus, which he built on a deserted island. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea he states that the laws of the world on the surface do not apply to him any longer, and that he has fled to the sea to escape the barbarism of the human race, with its wars and oppression. He claims to have no interest in the affairs of the world above, but occasionally intervenes to aid the oppressed, giving salvaged treasure to Cretans resisting a Turkish invasion, or sinking the warships that from time to time attack him.

Nemo goes out of his way to accommodate Professor Aronnax and his companions, and also, during a diving expedition, he risks his life to save a pearl diver from a shark attack. Nemo deliberately projects a stern and controlled confidence, but he is driven by a thirst for vengeance, and wracked by remorse over the deaths of his crewmembers and even by the deaths of enemy sailors. In The Mysterious Island, a still mysterious but gentler Nemo secretly helps a group of castaways on a remote Pacific island which he has made his final port and where he intends to die. In the end, he warns the castaways that the island will perish in a volcanic eruption, and dies of a mysterious illness just before the eruption. The colonists then obey his last instructions by scuttling the ship, which thus becomes his tomb.

In Part 3, Chapter 16 The Mysterious Island, Nemo presents himself as Prince Dakkar, the Hindu son of the rajah of Bundelkund and nephew of [[Tippoo Sahib] and possessed of a deep hatred of the British conquest of India. After the Sepoy mutiny, according to Nemo's account, he devoted himself to scientific research and developed an advanced electric submarine, the Nautilus. He and a crew of his followers then cruised the seas, battling injustice, especially slavery. The gold of Spanish ships sunk at the Bay of Vigo provided them with money with which to aid the oppressed.

Nemo's biography in The Mysterious Island does not entirely represent Verne's original intention. In the initial draft of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo was a Polish noble vengeful because of the murder of his family during the Russian repression of the Polish insurrection of 1863-1864. Verne's editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel feared a book ban in the Russian market and offending a French ally, the Russian Empire. He made Verne obscure Nemo's motivation in the first book, although it has been argued that Nemo hints at an Indian ancestry by saving an endangered South Indian pearl diver. (Following the scene in question, Nemo remarks to Aronnax, "That Indian is from the country of the oppressed. To my last breath, I am of that country.")

There is an apparent chronological inconsistency between the two novels in which Nemo appears. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was written between 1869 and 1870 and records the voyages of the Nautilus between 1867 and 1868. The Mysterious Island was written in 1874 but plays immediately after the American Civil War, from 1865 to 1867. This would mean that the Captain Nemo appearing in The Mysterious Island dies before the Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea sets out on his undersea voyages. Also, when Captain Nemo is finally met in The Mysterious Island, the meeting is set in 1868, the very year in which (according to Twenty Thousand Leagues) Aronnax escaped from the Nautilus, having come upon the submarine in 1867. But in The Mysterious Island, Nemo states that his first meeting with Aronnax took place "sixteen years ago."

Captain Nemo and France

Numerous details in the novel suggest an attachement of Nemo for France:

  • It is hinted that some of the crewmen of the Nautilus are of French origin and that Nemo looks like them. In chapter 8, Nemo and his first mate are seen by the three captives for the first time. After that, Prof. Arronax observes that "there is southern blood in them" and about the first-mate, he says: "his whole personality stamped with that southern–blooded zest that, in France, typifies the people of Provence."
  • Nemo shows great interest in the history of France and his otherwise indifferent behaviour takes an emotional tone whenever the history or the creations of the French are the issue. For example; in chapter 19, it is revealed that he keeps relics taken from the ship of the French explorer, La Pérouse. In Part II, Chapter 4, before the Suez Canal, he exclaims: "All hail to Mr. de Lesseps!" In Part II, Chapter 20, he spends several days looking for the wreck of the sunken French warship the Vengeur.
  • During the 21st chapter of Part II, Nemo attacks and sinks a warship of a nation that destroyed everything that he "loved, cherished, and venerated—homeland, wife, children, father, and mother!" This unidentified vessel is described as 'an armoured two-decker.' There are only two armoured two-deckers in history, and both were French vessels. In the original manuscript of the novel,[1] Verne adds: "the ship of a cursed, disgraced nation ... of the Solferino class." This would mean that France is Nemo's "unidentified enemy", and that Nemo is either an exiled revolutionary or an Algerian.

Beside his original appearance in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, Captain Nemo also appears in numerous other works though none written by Jules Verne and all works were created decades after the original books:

Portrayals

Trivia

  • His name is the Latin for "nobody" or "no one", an allusion to the answer given by Odysseus to Polyphemus in the Odyssey.
  • He has also been the subject of songs by Sarah Brightman and by the band, Dive.
  • The central character in the animated movie Finding Nemo by Disney and Pixar is named after him.
  • The Nightwish song Nemo was most probably written about this character.
  • The Gundam Mobile suit by the same name is notable in that it is a cannon fodder mecha and hence, is "nobody".
  • His personal flag is Argent letter "N" on sable field, notably similar to the device used by Napoleon.
  • In the Nintendo game, Donkey Kong Country 3, K. Rool's submarine, the Knautilus, was named after Nemo's submarine.
  • His name was used in the TV show Challenge Of the Super Friends episode entitled "Fairy Tales of Doom".
  • In a canyon in the Arizona Desert, the word NEMO was found scratched into the walls in two separate locations. In his book Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer speculates that the inscriptions may have been made by Everett Ruess, a nomad who disappeared in that area in the 1930s. He suggests that Ruess may have made a reference to Captain Nemo because he identified with Nemo's decision to "sever his every tie upon the Earth," as recorded in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

References

  1. ^ Hidden Treasures: The Manuscripts of Twenty thousand Leagues, William Butcher.

Images

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