I don't think this is about suicide except in the most metaphorical of ways. The Martin Eden reference would seem to suggest so, but when he invokes Ahab later that complicates matters. What ties them together is that the both destroyed themselves by failing to settle down, while manically striving for something always just out of reach.
To me, the character in this song is some who always has his foot halfway out the door. His human connections are superficial because he never stays in one place long enough to build them, and that's a vicious cycle that gives him one more reason to move on ("nobody knows me/I can't fathom my stayin'"). Being in motion (or at sea) is the only time he feels like he's someplace familiar ("the clouds are like headlines/in a new frontpage sky"--he can read them like the morning paper--"tears are saltwater"--any emotional connections he builds are eventually reduced to the very stuff of the ocean).
So I read the Eden/Ahab references not as invoking death or suicide, per se, but as the narrator's recognition that, although the peripatetic life is all he knows, it has the potential to ruin him.
I don't think this is about suicide except in the most metaphorical of ways. The Martin Eden reference would seem to suggest so, but when he invokes Ahab later that complicates matters. What ties them together is that the both destroyed themselves by failing to settle down, while manically striving for something always just out of reach.
To me, the character in this song is some who always has his foot halfway out the door. His human connections are superficial because he never stays in one place long enough to build them, and that's a vicious cycle that gives him one more reason to move on ("nobody knows me/I can't fathom my stayin'"). Being in motion (or at sea) is the only time he feels like he's someplace familiar ("the clouds are like headlines/in a new frontpage sky"--he can read them like the morning paper--"tears are saltwater"--any emotional connections he builds are eventually reduced to the very stuff of the ocean).
So I read the Eden/Ahab references not as invoking death or suicide, per se, but as the narrator's recognition that, although the peripatetic life is all he knows, it has the potential to ruin him.