Professor Arronax
The narrator of the novel holds himself in pretty high esteem. Actually, he holds himself in especially high esteem. Actually, he thinks himself surely one of the most intelligent men on the planet. This very fact makes it extremely ironic that he is not able to see Captain Nemo for the quite dangerous figure he actually turns out to be.
Accident? Incident? Ironic?
What’s the difference between an accident and an incident? Surely, the demarcation lies somewhere along the connotative spectrum. One man’s accident is another man’s incident. Captain Nemo raises this razor’s edge to the level of irony when an early confusion over the correct term is later echoed under somewhat different circumstances. Chapter XV is actually subtitled “Accident or Incident?” in order to play up the irony of the situation.
Conseil
Conseil is the narrator Arronax’s trusted, devoted, loyal Flemish boy. His name is less precisely Flemish than generally French and it translates—oddly enough—into “counsel.” As in advisor offering useful advice. None of which fits the poor boy, thus making his very name an ironic point.
Freedom’s Just Another Word
The casual reader will likely notice that there s a lot of talk about being free and the concept of freedom aboard the Nautilus. Nemo is very proud of the freedom to travel silently beneath the surface of the water, traversing the globe without so much as raising a suspicion amongst the world above. And yet, this freedom comes at the ultimate price of freedom: he is just as much a prisoner inside his marvelous machine as the rest.
Sodium! (and Irony)
Ironically, in a vast ocean of salt water, the Nautilus still requires actual land—admittedly land beneath the waves—in order to power itself. Sodium must be extracted from entire forests embedded during the geological periods, now mineralised and transformed into coal” which represent a rather unlikely “inexhaustible mine” that helps to keep the sub electrified.
