Neb is on almost every page of The Mysterious Island and never once in a sentence that matters.
Verne gave him one job. He serves Cyrus Harding, and that is his function and his entire characterisation. You do not learn where he came from. You do not learn what he wants or what he makes of any of it. What you get instead is devotion, running to a level that is almost sickening on a modern reading, because he is not written as a person. He is written as a quality that Harding happens to possess.
On a reread it was obvious the book would be better told from his side. The island story works. Five people come down in a balloon out of Richmond in March 1865 and have to build a life out of nothing on a rock in the Pacific. The person best placed to see all of it is the one the novel will not look at, because a man in Neb’s position in 1865 watches everybody as a matter of survival and nobody watches him back.
Why retell The Mysterious Island from Neb’s side?
Because on a reread it was obvious the book would be better that way.
The island story works. Five people come down in a balloon out of Richmond in March 1865 and have to build a life out of nothing on a rock in the Pacific. That is a strong situation and Verne knew what to do with it.
The person best placed to see all of it is the one the book will not look at. Neb watches everybody, because a man in his position in 1865 watches everybody as a matter of survival, and nobody watches him back.
Moving the center of the book to him does not change a single event on the island. It changes what the events mean.
The book on this: The Mysterious Island is the private record of the correspondent who wrote the famous account, kept alongside it and centred on the man that account erased.
Who narrates this version of The Mysterious Island?
Gideon Spilett, and this is his other set of notes.
Spilett kept two records from the beginning, the way any honest correspondent must. One went to the New York Herald in 1868 and became the book everybody read. The second he kept for himself, and this is that one.
He states his reason for releasing it plainly. The published account erases the most significant person on the island. Not through malice. Through the ordinary operation of a narrative that knows, without being told, whose inner life is worth recording and whose is not.
That sentence is the whole book, and it is also a description of what Verne did.
Is Gideon Spilett a reliable narrator?
No, and he says so himself on the first pages.
He selected, shaped, and omitted in the published account with the full deliberateness of his profession, and he tells the reader he has done it again here in different directions. He had access to Neb’s observable behavior and almost nothing of his interior life, which Neb kept with a discipline Spilett understood was not incidental.
So the record is labeled throughout. Where Spilett has reconstructed a conversation he was not present for, he says so. Where he is speculating about what somebody thought, he says he is speculating.
A correspondent trying to correct what a correspondent did, and admitting he cannot fully manage it, is a more useful narrator than one who claims to have got it right.
What else changes in The Mysterious Island?
Cyrus Harding gets examined.
In Verne he is a genius who is always right, which is another way of saying he is never questioned. In this record he did something during the war that the published account did not look at, and the island will not let him leave it unexamined.
There is also Magdalena Vasquez, who is not in the original at all.
And the period is written as it was. The book carries a content warning for slavery, Civil War violence, and the racism of 1865, because a novel that puts Neb at the center and then softens what 1865 was would be doing the same erasure in a friendlier register.
Who is Magdalena Vasquez?
A New Mexican widow who is not in Verne at all.
She reads men like Cyrus Harding faster than any of them read her, and that ability is doing structural work in the novel instead of decorating it. A colony of self-selected competent men, each certain of his own judgment, needs somebody in it whose judgment is about them.
Verne’s island has five castaways, all men, all useful in complementary ways, and none of them ever assesses another one. That is not how five people on a rock behave for two and a half years.
What did Cyrus Harding do in the war?
Something the published account did not examine.
In Verne he is an engineer of enormous competence who is right about everything, and being right about everything is another way of saying nobody ever questions him. He builds, he decides, and the novel agrees with him.
This record does not. There is something in his war that the Herald account passed over, and the island will not let him leave it unexamined, which is a different thing from punishing him for it.
A genius who is always right is a device. A man who was right about the nitroglycerin and wrong about something else entirely is a person.
How does Spilett label what he is guessing?
Explicitly, all the way through, which is the most unusual feature of the book.
Where he has reconstructed a conversation he was not present for, he says so. Where he is speculating about what somebody thought or decided, he says he is speculating. Some of the record is inference and it is marked as inference.
His stated limit is the important one. He had access to Neb’s observable behaviour and almost nothing of his interior life, which Neb kept with a discipline Spilett understood was not incidental. He makes no claim to have succeeded at correcting the absence. He calls it an attempt, insofar as a correspondent can correct what a correspondent has done.
A narrator who marks his own guesses is a narrator you can use.
How did five people end up on Lincoln Island?
A balloon out of Richmond in March 1865, and a question about which death was likelier.
Spilett’s framing of the decision is characteristic. The question was not whether they should attempt it. The question was whether the attempt would kill them before the alternative did.
He had reported from seventeen engagements of the war by then, stood in the telegraph office at Fredericksburg with grape-shot audible through the window, and twice been required to swim for his life. He records those facts and immediately says he is not recording them as boast.
On the precise sequence of events that made escape desirable, he declines to elaborate, because those events remain subject to the deliberations of parties whose interests he is not in a position to prejudice. That sentence is a correspondent telling you there is a story he is not going to tell, in 1869, in writing.
Where does The Mysterious Island fit in the Victorian Era Series?
Book two of three about Nemo.
Twenty Thousand Leagues, then this, then Eurydice. The Time Machine sits alongside them as a standalone.
The pattern across all three is the same. Verne wrote political manifestos and wrapped a plot around them, the characters are paper thin, and in each book there is somebody who has been given nothing to do. Ned Land in the first. Neb here. Ayrton in the third.
You do not need Verne to read this. It is built from the original and complete on its own.
Why does the published account still exist in the novel?
Because the gap between the two records is the point.
The Herald version ran in the spring of 1868 and then in a single volume that has been through several printings. It is the account everybody read and it made the island famous, and it was the work of a professional correspondent doing his job well.
Nothing in it is a lie. That is what makes it useful as a comparison. A correspondent can select, shape and omit with complete professional integrity and still produce something that erases the most significant person present.
Spilett’s own summary of why he is releasing the second record is the sentence the whole book runs on. The published account erases the most significant person on that island, not through malice, but through the ordinary operation of a narrative that knows without being told whose inner life is worth recording and whose is not.
He is describing his own profession. He is also describing what Verne did in 1875, and he could not have known that.
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