Qfwfq’s character in “The Aquatic Uncle” by Italo Calvino, displays hidden emotions that are never shown externally towards the other characters.
Q’s ancestry put emotions of embarrassment in his guts. Q is part of a generation in his family in which they are first adapting to land, something extraordinary in this time since all creatures lived in the sea at first. Q is not far back from when his ancestors were sea dwellers because he has a great uncle, Uncle N’ba N’ga, who is still a fish and is rejecting the idea of ever becoming a land dweller. His fiancée, Lll on the other hand is part of a generation that had generations before it already inhabited on land. Bringing this idea of his great uncle being a fish didn’t seem right for him to explain to Lll. As he narrates, he explains: “Knowing the prejudices among which she had been brought up, I hadn’t yet dared tell Lll that my great-uncle was a fish” (75). Q is hiding embarrassment here of the simple fact that his uncle is a fish, something he thinks Lll will despise. He hides this embarrassment, something he does with a lot with his emotions throughout the story, not expressing his true feelings. He is wearing a mask and refuses to take it off.
Eventually, Q’s fiancée Lll meets his great-uncle, transforming the emotional state inside of him. When Lll meets Q’s uncle, Q’s feelings of embarrassment weren’t shown or else the meeting wouldn’t have occurred at all. When she meets Q’s great uncle, Uncle N’ba N’ga, her reaction does not match the reaction he thought would occur. Q is surprised by this for not even he himself thinks his great uncle is of much sense. When Lll visits Uncle N’ba N’ga on a regular basis, that’s when that frightful embarrassment inside of Q boils into bitter jealousy. His inner jealousy is shown when he gives out a sarcastic shout to Lll during her lessons with Uncle N’ba N’ga: “Good for you! That’s a big step forward” (80). The fact that he gives the shout out in a sarcastic manner demonstrates how hard it is for him to release his true emotions. The jealousy is not shown but instead covered by a blanket of encouragement and happiness. This shows just how hard of a jail cell Q has to break out of to express his true emotions. If he cannot exemplify his own feelings to his future wife, the closest thing he’s got, then who can he unravel them to? Uncle N’ba N’ga is definitely not a choice, regularly expressing negativity and whatever he has on his mind, which Q has not inherited a single gene from.
In the end, Q goes into an inner state of acceptance and appreciation. Into the story, Lll surprisingly leaves Q for uncle N’ba N’ga, something unforeseen by Q himself! Unfortunately, Lll does not share the same passion and privilege of being a land inhabitant as he did. She seemed bothered by her ancestry’s mastery of land and believes that their talk is nonsense. This led to her uniting with uncle N’ba N’ga despite the fact that he is of old age. He is so old that his great-grandson is an evolved land critter, almost the complete contradiction of him. Q isn’t bothered much and has grown to forget Lll. Here, he describes his mindset of himself and the world around him: “They all had something I know, that made them somehow superior to me, sublime, something that made me compared to them, mediocre. And yet I wouldn’t have traded places with any of them” (82). Here, Q has finally moved on into acceptance. Though he sees other as having some way of an advantage over him, he could not care less. He has moved on, even if it was without Lll at his side. He was appreciative of the fact that he has evolved from a sea critter and into a land dweller. The event of Lll leaving him was a wakeup call to accept who he was, not wanting anything else.
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