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"So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me."
After Chapter 116 the book moves from its focus on Ishmael's finding of significances (political, personal, and metaphysical) in whales and whaling to an exploration of the psyche of the wounded captain, sometimes in form of overt analyses by the narrator-Ishmael and sometimes as Shakespearean monologues or dialogues. That exploration is punctuated by advances in the plot, leading up to the next inflection-point, Chapter 132, which opens the last act of the story.
After Chapter 116 the book moves from its focus on Ishmael's finding of significances (political, personal, and metaphysical) in whales and whaling to an exploration of the psyche of the wounded captain, sometimes in form of overt analyses by the narrator-Ishmael and sometimes as Shakespearean monologues or dialogues. That exploration is punctuated by advances in the plot, leading up to the next inflection-point, Chapter 132, which opens the last act of the story.
Chapter 118 The Quadrant
Chapter 118 The Quadrant
Ahab's rejection of the sextant is the bold egotism of Milton's Satan; as Satan rejects the command of God, Ahab, in rejecting the sextant, rejects the sun—the external creation—as a guide.
Ahab's rejection of the sextant is the bold egotism of Milton's Satan; as Satan rejects the command of God, Ahab, in rejecting the sextant, rejects the sun—the external creation—as a guide.
Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"
Chapter 119 The Candles
Chapter 119 The Candles
The lightning of the typhoon that darkens the loveliness of the Japanese grounds becomes a darker darkness when Ahab seeks to master the St. Elmo's fire, the corpusants (holy bodies) that appears as a flame that makes each mast a candle.
The lightning of the typhoon that darkens the loveliness of the Japanese grounds becomes a darker darkness when Ahab seeks to master the St. Elmo's fire, the corpusants (holy bodies) that appears as a flame that makes each mast a candle.
"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those main-mast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So."Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.
...
"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"
When his diabolic harpoon glows with the eerie light, a metaphysical rebellion turns into a workplace problem after the crew, hearing Starbuck's warning about the voyage, the "panic-stricken crew" runs from Ahab:
When his diabolic harpoon glows with the eerie light, a metaphysical rebellion turns into a workplace problem after the crew, hearing Starbuck's warning about the voyage, the "panic-stricken crew" runs from Ahab:
Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! t'is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."
Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattlinglightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—
"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay.
Ship with "corpusants"
Chapter 120 The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch and Chapter 121 Midnight—The Forecastle Bulwarks and Chapter 122 Midnight Aloft—Thunder and Lightning
Chapter 120 The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch and Chapter 121 Midnight—The Forecastle Bulwarks and Chapter 122 Midnight Aloft—Thunder and Lightning
Two dialogues and a monologue present Ahab's defiance of caution in sailing, Stubb and Flask's faintly apprehensive reaction, and finally, Tashtego's desire for rum.
Two dialogues and a monologue present Ahab's defiance of caution in sailing, Stubb and Flask's faintly apprehensive reaction, and finally, Tashtego's desire for rum.
Chapter 123 The Musket
Chapter 123 The Musket
Starbuck's temptation to save the ship and his future disappears without comment, largely because we know him well enough to understand he cannot pick up the musket:
Starbuck's temptation to save the ship and his future disappears without comment, largely because we know him well enough to understand he cannot pick up the musket:
"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, Sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed and set; she heads her course."
"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"
Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak.
The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel; Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel;but turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
Remember what Ishmael said of Starbuck in Chapter 41—" the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck."
Remember what Ishmael said of Starbuck in Chapter 41—" the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck."
Chapter 124 The Needle
Chapter 124 The Needle
The reversal of the compass needle in the storm, and the subsequent creation of a new one from the point of a lance reinforces Ahab's claim of mastery over the natural world.
The reversal of the compass needle in the storm, and the subsequent creation of a new one from the point of a lance reinforces Ahab's claim of mastery over the natural world.
For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feignhave wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level load-stone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles. Quick!
Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.
"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any."
...
(390) At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,—"Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"
One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.
Chapter 125 The Log and Line
Chapter 125 The Log and Line
How does the Manxman's comment about Ahab leading Pip bear on the solipsism of using only the log and line to measure one's location? There is, of course, a moral equivalent of the log land line.
There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."
Chapter 126 The Life-Buoy
Chapter 126 The Life-Buoy
Beyond the obvious symbolism of the Pequod having a coffin for a life-buoy, and the interpretation of the seal cries, the chapter has a foreshadowing of the end in the loss of the crewman who first climbed the mast-head in Moby-Dick's home waters. The eccentric carpenter gets another moment onstage.
Chapter 127 The Deck
Chapter 127 The Deck
The highly Shakespearean byplay between Ahab and the carpenter is followed by a Melvillean soliloquy with a few Shakespearean flourishes.
(Ahab to himself.)
"There's a sight! There's a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!"
Chapter 128 The Pequod Meets the Rachel
Chapter 128 The Pequod Meets the Rachel
Ahab's refusal to help Captain Gardiner is the index of his alienation from himself as a person—I am drawn back to chapter 44, The Chart, where purpose and person diverge (with, by the way, a hint of of Ahab's blasphemy in calling the powers identified with the corpusants as "unbegotten", powers he half-embraces as his own).
Chapter 129 The Cabin
Chapter 129 The Cabin
Ahab's colloquy with Pip in the cabin is more of the Shakespearean use of apparent nonsense as vehicle of meaning—"True are thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre"(thes phrase, like "unbegoten" in the last chapter, reinforces Ahab's rejection of the divine). This passage shows the other self that, despite the rejection of the Rachel's plea, still exists. Again, I think about "The Chart," although here the "living principle, or soul" entrapped in the mad purpose finds at least a temporary escape.
Ahab's colloquy with Pip in the cabin is more of the Shakespearean use of apparent nonsense as vehicle of meaning—"True are thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre"(thes phrase, like "unbegoten" in the last chapter, reinforces Ahab's rejection of the divine). This passage shows the other self that, despite the rejection of the Rachel's plea, still exists. Again, I think about "The Chart," although here the "living principle, or soul" entrapped in the mad purpose finds at least a temporary escape.
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
Chapter 130 The Hat
Chapter 130 The Hat
The exhibition of Ahab's public self returns us to what in chapter 44 is called "crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasably steadfast hunter of the white whale." It is this Ahab whose hat is torn from his head by the sea-hawk, who "on and on, in advance of the prow" drops it from vast height into the sea. In an echo of chapter 30, The Pipe.
The exhibition of Ahab's public self returns us to what in chapter 44 is called "crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasably steadfast hunter of the white whale." It is this Ahab whose hat is torn from his head by the sea-hawk, who "on and on, in advance of the prow" drops it from vast height into the sea. In an echo of chapter 30, The Pipe.
Chapter 131 The Pequod Meets the Delight
Chapter 131 The Pequod Meets the Delight
After the warning from the captain of the mis-named Delight, Ahab flees the burial service for the one recovered body from their encounter with Moby-Dick, only as the crew member cries out from the Delight, "ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!"
After the warning from the captain of the mis-named Delight, Ahab flees the burial service for the one recovered body from their encounter with Moby-Dick, only as the crew member cries out from the Delight, "ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!"
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