Analysis of Setting

By: Klementz

           The adventurous sci-fi novel; 20'000 Leagues Under the Sea, is written in a setting of man living alongside nature and utilizing the aspects in order to survive for themselves. Nature may be able to provide the necessary resources for the crew to live, but it also generates multiple life threatening dangers. Since the book is mostly spent on the Nautilus it constantly moves from one location to the other, and thus the scenery changes at an explosive pace. The novel's cultural opinion is that men should not be trusted, and that they are dangerous beings. This seems a little ironic since the protagonist is human, but near the midsection of the novel it reveals that Nemo does in fact dislike the society above waters, thus explaining his reasoning of why he would live his life as a hermit. So because he lives underwater he must capture the food that his crew members eat, this is made possible by the inventions of Captain Nemo. Along the timeline of the story readers will eventually begin to question Nemo's intelligence, because his inventions seem almost impossible due to the time period that this novel is set in; 1966, this give a hint of sci-fi within  the story. Alongside the wonderful seafood cuisine, they must attain clothing which is obtained through means of sea kelp and fur within the deep sea. The dangerous and action packed novel holds a couple scenes where they are at the brink of defeat; for example when Nemo was nearly mauled by a shark, but was saved by Ned Land who had rescued the Captain with a harpoon. Jules Verne introduces multiple examples of imagery of life beneath the tides, he gives intense detail to almost everything in the novel. This type of imagery gives the plot a little bit more emphasis to its scenery. But in the end the novel is just as mysterious as the ocean truly is to us, to put it together it seems as if it is was a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside of an enigma. From the Nautilus, to the rest of the unknown creatures within the sea, this novel gives the readers an ample amount of questions for the book, and leaves us to think about what is truly within the unexplored regions underneath the oceans.