Whales fall squarely into the category of charismatic megafauna and this whale in particular is nearly impossible to resist anthropomorphizing. A solitary whale that passes from land to land with ‘strange power of speech’ provides a nice picture of existential thalassology–all the melancholy fatefulness of the Wandering Jew with none of the anti-Semitism.
Bill Christensen over at technovelgy.com points out the parallels between this story and Foghorn, written by Ray Bradbury in 1951:
“I saw it all, I knew it all-the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps fried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.”
