The Nautilus Is Gorgeous and Captain Nemo Won’t Shut Up

A monster, a harpooner, and a very fancy submarine

Here’s the setup. It’s 1866 and something is out there ramming ships. Everyone thinks it’s a giant narwhal or a sea monster, because of course they do. Enter Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist who is basically Verne wearing a fake mustache, plus his loyal servant Conseil (who classifies animals the way some people breathe) and a Canadian harpooner named Ned Land who is all appetite and impatience and honestly the only one of them I’d want at a bar. They set off to hunt the beast. The beast turns out to be a submarine. They get captured by it. And that’s the trap the whole book springs on you: they can never leave.

The submarine is the Nautilus, and it belongs to Captain Nemo, a man with no past, no nationality he’ll admit to, and a grudge against the surface world so total that he has simply opted out of humanity. He’ll feed you, house you, show you the most incredible sights on Earth, and never once let you go home. That tension is the actual engine of the novel. Not the plot. The captivity.

What kills me about it, in both directions

Look, I first read this as a kid in an abridged version and thought it was a straight-up thrill ride. Then I read the full thing in my twenties, sprawled on a friend’s couch during a rainy week when I’d run out of other books, and I got ambushed by how strange and melancholy it actually is. Nemo is not a hero. He’s a wound with an organ inside it. There’s a scene where he plays this vast, mournful instrument in the dark and Aronnax realizes he’s basically eavesdropping on a man grieving something he’ll never name, and I put the book down and just sat there. That’s the thing nobody tells you: under all the gadgetry, this is a book about a man who cannot forgive.

And the set pieces, when Verne commits, are unreal. The walk through the underwater forest of Crespo Island, where they hunt in diving suits and everything is silent and green and slow. The funeral at the bottom of the sea. The moment they reach the South Pole and Nemo plants his flag on a spot no human has ever stood, and it’s triumphant and deranged at the same time. And the squid. THE SQUID. The fight against the giant cephalopods is the scene the whole 19th century was building toward, and it delivers: chaos, a lost crewman, Ned Land swinging a harpoon in a doorway. I have read a hundred sea-monster scenes since and this is still the one they’re all imitating.

Now the part where I have to be honest with you. This book is padded. Verne got paid to educate French schoolboys about oceanography and you can feel every franc of it. There are long, LONG stretches where Aronnax and Conseil essentially read the ocean aloud to each other: genus, species, depth, salinity, thank you, next. I’ve heard people call these passages hypnotic and immersive and I want to believe them, I do, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t skim. Somewhere around the third itemized list of mollusks I started questioning whether my love of this book is real or just inherited, a thing I’m supposed to admire. Bear with me here: I think the answer is that the wonder is real and the delivery system is creaky, and you have to make peace with carrying one to get the other.

The other flat note is the ending, which arrives like Verne looked at the clock and panicked. After all that slow, deliberate dread, the escape happens in a rush, half-remembered, dreamlike, and Nemo just… dissolves out of the story. Some readers find that haunting. I find it a little unearned, like he built this incredible cage and then forgot to write the door.

Nemo named his ship for the Latin for “nobody,” and that’s the whole tragedy right there: a genius who chose to become no one rather than belong to the world that hurt him.

About Jules Verne

Verne was a French guy who wanted to write plays, got nudged toward adventure fiction, and accidentally invented a chunk of modern science fiction while trying to make geography fun. He wrote the massive Voyages Extraordinaires series, sending characters around the world, to the moon, to the center of the Earth, always with a suitcase full of research and a real belief that machines were about to change everything. He got things eerily right (submarines, powered flight) and gloriously wrong, and he did it decades before the technology existed. He’s often lumped in with H.G. Wells, but where Wells was skeptical and political, Verne was a boy with a map and a dream, and honestly I’ll take the boy with the map.

If the Nautilus got its hooks in you, read these next

• The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne — Verne circles back to Nemo here, and it recontextualizes everything; read it as the sequel your heart wants.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne — the same descent-into-the-unknown thrill, tighter and weirder, with a nephew who complains beautifully.
• The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham — a 20th-century heir to the “something is down there and it is not friendly” tradition, colder and creepier.
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville — if you liked a monomaniac captain and don’t mind the cetology chapters, this is the American cousin that goes even harder.

You can grab a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on Amazon in about nine hundred editions; get an unabridged one with a translation people actually respect, because the old public-domain ones butchered it.

For your book club

1. Is Captain Nemo a villain, a victim, or something the labels don’t cover? What does his refusal to explain his past do to how you read him?
2. The three captives (Aronnax, Conseil, Ned Land) respond to imprisonment in totally different ways. Which one is you, honestly?
3. Verne clearly loves the science lectures. Did the long descriptive passages pull you deeper into the world or push you out of the story?
4. Nemo has advanced technology and immense wealth, yet uses it to withdraw from humanity entirely. What is Verne saying about progress and isolation?
5. The ending is abrupt and dreamlike on purpose. Does that ambiguity feel earned to you, or like Verne ran out of pages?