Vent: Our book club nearly split over whether Ishmael was a reliable narrator in Moby Dick
Last Tuesday at my place in Portland, we had 9 people crammed in my living room for Moby Dick and it got ugly fast. My friend Dana said Ishmael was totally reliable and everyone should just trust the text, then Marcus said he was clearly making stuff up because how could one sailor know all that. I watched 2 people stop talking to each other for a full 10 minutes while the rest of us just sat there. So I grabbed the whiteboard I use for grocery lists and made everyone write down one scene that felt off. We ended up with 14 scenes on that board and spent the next hour arguing about just 3 of them. Turns out the fight was never about Ishmael, it was about whether we trust narrators in general. How do you all handle it when a debate gets personal instead of staying on the book?