How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
No more; I'll launch my yawl—ho, cheerly, heart! and push away for fairy-land—for rainbow's end, in fairy land. (1.29)
The narrator of "The Piazza" talks about launching his boat for fairyland. He's not really launching a boat; he's just sitting there, and journeying out in his imagination. The use of nautical imagery is probably linked to the fact that Melville was best known for travel and sea stories. He's suggesting that the sea stories were fairy stories too; they're both dreams, one's just a little more salty than the other.
Quote #2
"Oh if I could but once get to yonder house, and but look upon whoever the happy being is that lives there!" (1.94)
Marianna dreams that the narrator's house is happy, and that the narrator is happy too. Of course, Marianna is just a dream, making the narrator a dream of a dream. He doesn't exactly seem happy about that.
Quote #3
To and fro I walk the piazza deck, haunted by Marianna's face, and many as real a story. (1.97)
Marianna's story isn't real. In fact, it's barely a story; we don't learn anything about her except that she's sad and lonely. She's more an emotion than a real story with a plot. So this is kind of a warning about what versions of reality we're going to get in this book. They won't necessarily be page turners.
Quote #4
Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. (3.4)
This description of Delano comes early in "Benito Cereno", and it explains, in part, how he got so easily duped. He sees the world as a good, happy place, and doesn't notice evil. Which is all well and good…but really, the main "version of reality" that causes Delano to be obtuse is racism. It isn't that he sees all people as good; it's that he himself is racist and kind of evil, and so doesn't see black people as human.
Quote #5
"See, master—you shook so—here's Babo's first blood."
No sword drawn before James the First of England, no assassination in that timid King's presence, could have produced a more terrified aspect than was now presented by Don Benito." (3.266)
In Delano's version of reality, Babo is saying, here's the first time I've cut Cereno. In Cereno's, though, he's hearing Babo theaten to cut his throat.
Quote #6
Once again he smiled at the phantoms which had mocked him, and felt something like a tinge of remorse, that, by harboring them even for a moment, he should, by implication, have betrayed an atheist doubt of the ever-watchful Providence above. (3.355)
Delano is constantly thinking something is wrong, and then assuring himself that it isn't and upbraiding himself for ever considering the possibility of evil for a moment. He has faith in his version of reality—that faith being, not in a watchful Providence so much as in his own racist vision of black people.
Quote #7
Don Joaquin, with a hatchet tied edge out and upright to his hand, was made by the negroes to appear on the bulwarks; whereupon, seen with arms in his hands and in a questionable attitude, he was shot for a renegade seamen. (3.412)
Getting the wrong version of reality is deadly. The Americans shot many of the Spanish sailors, through ignorance and confusion. Which calls into question the version of reality in which the Americans are heroic saviors. They seem more like vicious racist thugs, who don't care who they kill.
Quote #8
"Are you so horribly ignorant, then," he cried, "as not to know that by far the most dangerous part of a house, during such a terrific tempest as this, is the fire-place?" (4.13)
The Lightning-rod salesman has a whole host of pseudo-scientific factoids with which he tries to convince the narrator to purchase a lightning rod. Marketing is a world of its own.
Quote #9
I know not whether I am not the occasional victim of optical delusion concerning the Gallipagos…as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with "Memento****" burning in live letters upon his back. (5.18)
The asterixes here stand in for Mori, so the whole thing burned into the giant tortoises back is "Memento Mori", which is a Latin phrase referring to the vanity of earthly life. This dream vision is basically of a giant tortoise of death. The Galapagos becomes a kind of barren afterlife haunted by giant tortoises—which Shmoop thinks is supposed to be grim and impressive, but is actually a version of reality which gives Shmoop the giggles.
Quote #10
How we get there, we alone know. If we sought to tell others, what the wiser were they? (5.72)
Melville is talking about climbing to the top of Rodondo rock…which he suggests is actually impossible. "The Encantadas" is a piece of travel writing—but it's a fanciful kind of travel writing, where you can see things (like death tortoises) and go places (like the top of the rock) that are impossible. So it ends up being, not a real, you-are-there tour of the Galapagos, but a fantasy, dream Galapagos; an enchanted version of the Enchanted Isles.