The Good Captain

The Good Captain is an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno.” Melville’s original story relies upon the main character’s first-person perceptions of the events that unfold in front of him. This reliance on P.O.V. is why I chose to distribute the story using the web service Twitter. Twitter limits updates to 140 characters of text, and so this story is broken up into small, 2-3 line paragraphs. The temporal nature of this storytelling method required that the story include frequent reminders of previous events, to help keep readers aware of the context of the events. This was especially important given that the time span of the bulk of the events is about twelve hours, and the length of time that the story ran for was four months.

The Good Captain began broadcasting over Twitter on November 3, 2007. It concluded on February 29, 2008.

The original page can be viewed at: http://www.twitter.com/goodcaptain It is also available in multiple formats: as a paperback and ebook-edition, as well as in PDF-format: http://www.loose-fish.com/waifpole/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/thegoodcap...

(Source: Project website)