Question

Match the attitude toward science to the character. (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)

1. to show nature, including the divine, to man Ned Land
2. practical, mistrusts it Aronnax
3. a classifier, no imagination Captain Nemo
4. for power and revenge Conseil

Answer 1

@smilewithmehun what do you think the answer is?

Answer 2

I'm not sure, this is due soon and I wasn't given the right amount of time to read the book ._. @ShadowLegendX.

Answer 3

Character information:

Ned Land:
Hark, Land, ho! Another meaningful name, eh Mr. Verne? We see what you're doing here. So, Ned Land is a bit of a contradiction. He's a harpooner, a man of the sea, but his name is Land. And he spends most of the book trying to get back onto that dry, dirt-y stuff.

While Aronnax aspires to lofty knowledge and greatness and all, Ned's desires are pretty basic. He likes freedom, hunting, and eating what he hunts. As we see early on, Ned classifies fish based on the way they taste. He has no time for Conseil's scientific classification gobbledygook, and he has even less patience for Aronnax's starry eyes (for the deep sea).

We'd get tired of a buddy who said things like this to us:

Ah, friend Ned, are you already tired of our journey under the seas? Are you already blasé about this constantly changing spectacle of submarine marvels? For my part, I would be most upset to come to the end of this voyage which so few men have had the chance to make. (2.4.13)

To be honest, Ned has been ready to peace the heck outta the Nautilus since day one. There's really very little to satisfy Ned's desires inside of a stupid electric submarine. Aronnax and Conseil are sort of compensated for their imprisonment because they have the chance to look at all sorts of undersea animals and other outlandish phenomena.

But Ned… well, Ned gets to kill a dugong and shoot some kangaroos. As Aronnax says to Nemo:

For me, study is a support, a powerful diversion, an absorption, a passion which can help me forget everything. For Ned, not so much, and there's nothing on board the Nautilus to fill that hole. (1.19.59)
A Straight-Shootin' Soul

Now, don't go thinking that Ned's a totally sad sack. He's capable of amazing acts of bravery. He saves Nemo from a killer shark, and puts his life on the line to take down a killer squid.

He's simply—and this may come as a shock—too sensitive, and too used to living on land, to enjoy himself on the Nautilus. By the end of the book, he's on the verge of suicide, and it's only an act of daring that frees him from Nemo's grasp… And the clutches of the ever-frightening Maelstrom (a.k.a. the Whirlpool of Doom).

Finally, it's important to note that, according to Aronnax, Land is both French-Canadian and American. He speaks English and French with equal ease, and seems to be both typically Anglo-Saxon and classically French. So, in stark contrast to Aronnax and Nemo's staunch nationalism, this guy's kind of a melting pot.

Ned's multiple nationalities speak to his general level-headedness. Ned believes in what he sees (with that absolutely perfect vision of his), not what he reads in stuffy old books, unlike Professor Arrogance—er, Aronnax. Land is the doer to Aronnax's thinker.

To be sure, Ned is the one who keeps Aronnax from totally going off the deep end (har har) along with Nemo. He's Aronnax's foil. (See our "Character Roles" section for more on the antagonistic relationship between these two characters.)
Ned Land's Timeline

Aronnax:
Ever notice how close the name Aronnax is to arrogance? Well, we don't think that's an accident. Pierre Aronnax is billed as a scientist's scientist, a Professor of Marine Biology who lectures at hoity-toity European museums. But the dude begins 20,000 Leagues by claiming that the creature currently terrorizing the world's oceans is a giant narwhal. Boy, is he wrong.

So, our introduction to Aronnax isn't exactly flattering. He thinks he knows everything, but he misses a lot. And he gets kinda agitated when other people seem to surpass his own capabilities.

For example, Professor Arrogance didn't build any submarines. And when he boards the Nautilus, he's very suspicious of how Captain Nemo could have put the thing together on his own. Sure, we admit it: it's pretty hard to imagine how Nemo could have constructed such a crazy futuristic piece of technology all by his lonesome. But Aronnax's response to the Nautilus reeks of envy and insecurity:

That a private individual had at his disposition a mechanical contrivance of this sort was improbable. When and where could he have had it built, and how could he have kept its construction secret? (1.2.6)

Dude is really trying to save face here. Similarly, Professor Arrogance often puts the preservation of knowledge and the upholding of social norms above humanity. Like, even above his own, and others', safety.

For most of the novel, Aronnax and Ned Land engage in verbal fisticuffs about their potential escape from the Nautilus. Aronnax is so often paralyzed by indecision that he just sits and watches the pretty fishies swim by the sub's giant windows. And what might wrest him from his own inaction, you ask? Further self-absorption, of course:

We had not been made to break with humanity. For my part, I did not wish my intriguing and original studies to be buried with me. (1.18.7)

Ah, now here's the real reason Aronnax must return to land: if he doesn't, no one will ever laud him for all of the fantastic discoveries he made aboard the Nautilus.

We're guessing that you're also wondering why our protagonist seems so darn obsessed with people's nationalities. At least with Nemo, this shtick kind of makes sense, because Aronnax is trying to figure out how his Captain ended up so ragey. So Aronnax thinks deep thoughts like, "Would I ever know to what nation this strange man belonged, that boasted of belonging to none?" (1.14.24).

But that's not the whole story, is it? Clearly, Aronnax's got a lot of national pride. He gets all excited when other people can speak his language, and he's evidently a little disappointed that the ol' harpooner is French-Canadian—a.k.a, not the real (French) deal. Plus, when the group gets into a little fracas with those cannibals, Aronnax seems less concerned with getting eaten alive than he is with acting like a good European should:

I could easily have shot this native, within close range, but I believed it better to wait for really hostile behaviour. When dealing with savages, it is better for the Europeans to riposte, rather than attack first. (1.22.39)

In part, Aronnax's obsessive nationalism is a product of Verne's times. But it also furthers the book's theme of the questionable defensibility of violence; is there any backstory Aronnax could dream up for Nemo that'd justify Nemo's killings? What do you think Aronnax is trying to justify by obsessively focusing on his and others' nationalities?

Captainn Nemo:
Just like our boy Aronnax, Nemo's name packs a literary punch. It alerts us readers to the fact that Nemo is larger than (fictionalized) life; he's not just a character, he's a symbol (see our "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" section for more information). What's he a symbol of, you ask?

Well, Nemo means "no one" in Latin. So his middle name might as well be mystery. Clearly, Verne wants us to be curious about Nemo's past. We empathize deeply with Aronnax's incessant questions about Nemo's true identity, because the dude's utter out-there-ness has kept us up at night, too.

At the end of the novel, when all is usually revealed, we are left only with Aronnax's remaining questions about his Captain:

Is Captain Nemo still alive? [...] Will the waves one day wash up the manuscript containing the entire story of his life? Will I finally discover his name? Will the nationality of the vessel sunk tell us Captain Nemo's own nationality? (2.23.5)

So we guess we'll have to wait 'till Nemo's tell-all comes out before we can get some darn answers around here, huh? Nah, don't give up on Verne (or us) too soon, dear Shmoopers. Maybe the important thing about Nemo is his enigmatic nature.

Allow us to prove it to you. First, he's a private person. He built his own special submarine just so he could be alone, away from society. He famously says:

I am not what you call a civilized being! I have broken with society for reasons which I alone have the right to appreciate. So I do not obey its rules, and I ask you never to invoke them in my presence again! (1.10.20)

Nemo won't even surface to bury his dead crewmen. He puts them to rest in a massive undersea cemetery. Aronnax seems to think that Nemo buries the bodies under the sand so that they will be "out of the reach of sharks." But Captain Nemo wryly points out that it isn't just the sharks he's worried about; in this cemetery, his dead men will be safe from both "sharks and men!" (1.24.76-7).

We never do learn where that warship at the end of the novel was from. Or if Nemo was actually an American Civil War veteran. The fact is, no man (or woman)—us readers included—can get the truth out of him. And this mystery is precisely what allows Nemo to become more than a man in 20,000 Leagues.
Captain Nemo: Larger Than Life

After Nemo destroys the mystery battleship near the end of the novel, Aronnax notes:

His character was accentuated and took on a superhuman dimension. He was no longer a fellow human, but a marine being, a spirit of the seas. (22.37)

Aronnax doesn't mean Nemo's a superhero. Although, he would become one in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Come to think of it, he also shares some similarities with Aquaman, who, depending on whom you ask, may or may not be the son of Nemo.

Anyway, Aronnax is really pointing out that Nemo's more myth—more story, more gossip—than man. And this larger-than-life image of Mr. Nemo wouldn't hold water (hilarious, we know) if we knew some more real facts about Nemo's life.

Like, if we were to learn that Nemo was actually from Cleveland, Ohio, where he's got a wife and two kids waiting for him to come home, he wouldn't seem so special after all. In order to be No One, Nemo has to be a kind of an everyman.

Considering his position outside—and maybe even "above"—mankind, it's not so surprising that Nemo makes proclamations like "I am the law, I am the justice!" (21.59). In the end, he's a man who's lost his country, his family, and his old identity.

There's no use digging into Nemo's past because by the time we meet him, his past has become sort of irrelevant. Now, he's simply Nemo, No One, a maritime ball o' questionably-motivated violence—and nothing more.
Captain Nemo's Timeline


Conseil:
Okay, guys, let's get the obvious out of the way first. Conseil means counsel, in French, which is pretty ironic. This guy is basically in the book to serve his master, Aronnax (and be his trusty life-saver, we might add). He would never deign to advise his master.

And, as you may have noticed, Conseil really, really loves Aronnax. His dedication to the guy, at the cost of his own survival instincts, makes us kind of uncomfortable, actually. Conseil just seems to think whatever his master thinks, and do whatever his master does.

There are plenty of examples of Conseil's servile behavior. Like how he jumps in after Aronnax when he's thrown overboard, and helps him survive, even though Aronnax is pretty much whining like a little baby the whole time.

But there's more to our boy Conseil than meets the eye. Beneath Conseil's loyal shell, and beyond his impressive, obsessive, bizarre ability to classify animals and plants—fish that he requires Aronnax to recognize first—lies a strange core.

Sometimes, Conseil's deficiencies are funny. Like when he can't believe that cod don't look like the filleted, gutted things you see in the fish market. Or when he decides to eat the fish that stings him "out of revenge," even though it tastes awful. But other times, they reveal a passion you wouldn't expect to find in a man who sometimes acts like a robot.

Take his reaction to the cannibal attack. On the one hand, he seems, how do we say this, non-judgmental. Sure, he compares savages to monkeys—you can't really forgive that little bit o' racism—but he also makes some surprisingly insightful statements. When Aronnax suggests that the "savages" must be "bad" because they're cannibals, Conseil replies:

One can be a cannibal and a good man […] just as one can be a glutton and honest. The one does not exclude the other. (1.22.46)

However, shortly after making this remark, Conseil nearly shoots one of the cannibals because a stone he's thrown breaks a rare shell. So we guess one can be kind of a thoughtful person and a master-serving oddball?

Above all, Conseil will always be Aronnax's loyal servant. But Conseil's eccentricities show us that there is more to this man who spends most of his time doing his master's bidding. He's not a one-dimensional dude.
Conseil's Timeline

REFERENCE: http://www.shmoop.com/20000-leagues-under-the-sea/

Answer 4

It's shorter than the book :P @smilewithmehun

Answer 5

But read up, it has good information

Answer 6

Thank you :)