Herman Melville

I and My Chimney Herman Melville

An amusing and multi-layered tale, I and My Chimney appears at first glance to simply be a man's lengthy description and admiration of his home's chimney. Although his wife is opposed to keeping the chimney, the narrator is so attached to it that he cannot bear to let it be demolished or remodeled into something different. In fact, the narrator is adamant and stubborn: the chimney must remain undisturbed. Despite its benign topic, I and My Chimney offers readers a superb example of Herman Melville's talents and themes. His lively descriptions make a subject which might otherwise be boring, interesting. He reveals much about his narrator's character, and his great fixation upon exploring aspects of the human condition, through an object that is seemingly mundane. The quirky, out-of-place brick chimney has been variously interpreted as the narrator's own identity; to destroy it would be to destroy the unique part of himself, a fact that others do not seem to comprehend. I and My Chimney is also however a work of humor which lightheartedly explores how people come to be attached to objects, offering and inferring life from things which are inanimate.