Chapter Two: The Carpet-Bag
“But it's too late to make any improvements
now. The universe is finished; the copestone
is on, and the chips were carted off a million
years ago.”
Chapter Three: Spouter's Inn
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to
it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what
that marvellous painting meant.
But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a
gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory
of my own, partly based upon the aggregated
opinions of many aged persons with whom I
conversed upon the subject. The picture represents
a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the halffoundered ship weltering there with its three
dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated
whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in
the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three
mast-heads.
Home sweet home?
A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above,
and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy
you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling
night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On
one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked
glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide
world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the
room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a
right whale's head.
Just in case you haven't caught on yet – the journey's already begun!
Even the Inn has become ship-like. And the bar is manned by Jonah, who
biblically was a man swallowed by a whale.
The mysterious harpooner
I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend
the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to
unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be
good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea
of sleeping with a madman....
"Wall," said the landlord.... be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer
I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from the south seas,
where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads (great
curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one
he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would
not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is
goin' to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him
just as he was goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a
string, for all the airth like a string of inions."
What does he look like???

Reasonably or not, Ishmael reacts to the
harpooner's appearance with terrified
silence.
Comic relief...
For all his tattooings he was on the whole a
clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this
fuss I have been making about, thought I to
myself—the man's a human being just as I am:
he has just as much reason to fear me, as I
have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a
sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his
tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call
it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will
turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man
smoking in bed with me. It's dangerous.
Besides, I ain't insured." ….
"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
Chapter Four: The Counterpane

The laughs continue... tinged with slight
discomfort???

First, Ishmael is trapped beneath a
sleeping Queequeg's arm

Then, Queequeg dresses himself in an
order that defies logic before “proudly
march[ing] out of the room, wrapped up
in his great pilot monkey jacket, and
sporting his harpoon like a marshal's
baton.”
Chapter Five: Breakfast
“You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore.
This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue,
and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been
three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him
looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is
in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but
slightly bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks
ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which,
barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to
show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.”
Conclusion:
Chapter Six: The Street
“...you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more
comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green
Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and
glory in the fishery.
… Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in
the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons,
and all, down the throat of the tempest.”
Ishmael is still finding things to laugh about; however, here
we once again get the suggestion that life at sea is not all
laughs and that death is a constant threat, ready and eager
to drown the naïve.
The streets flow with …. oil.
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round
yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered.
Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from
the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they
were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of
the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to
their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few
porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a
brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in
every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in
spermaceti candles.
Everything is transformed by its
association with the whale.
Ishmael's spirits, the town,
women, etc...
“And the women of New
Bedford, they bloom like
their own red roses. But
roses only bloom in
summer; whereas the
fine carnation of their
cheeks is perennial as
sunlight in the seventh
heavens. Elsewhere
match that bloom of
theirs, ye cannot, save
in Salem, where they
tell me the young girls
breathe such musk,
their sailor sweethearts
smell them miles off
shore, as though they
were drawing nigh the
odorous Moluccas
instead of the Puritanic
sands.”
Chapter Seven: The Chapel
“In this same New Bedford there
stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and
few are the moody fishermen,
shortly bound for the Indian Ocean
or Pacific, who fail to make a
Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure
that I did not.”
“Each silent worshipper seemed
purposely sitting apart from the
other, as if each silent grief were
insular and incommunicable.”
“...how it is that we still refuse to be comforted
for those who we nevertheless maintain are
dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the
living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore
but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will
terrify a whole city. All these things are not
without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the
tombs, and even from these dead doubts she
gathers her most vital hope.”
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into
Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely
mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that
what they call my shadow here on earth is my true
substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual,
we are too much like oysters observing the sun through
the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of
air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a
stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my
soul, Jove himself cannot.
No, thought I, there must be
some sober reason for this
thing; furthermore, it must
symbolize something unseen.
Can it be, then, that by that act
of physical isolation, he
signifies his spiritual withdrawal
for the time, from all outward
worldly ties and connexions?
Yes, for replenished with the
meat and wine of the word, to
the faithful man of God, this
pulpit, I see, is a selfcontaining stronghold—a lofty
Ehrenbreitstein, with a
perennial well of water within
the walls.
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is
ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its
rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the
storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow
must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of
breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds.
Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a
voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
Chapter Nine: The Sermon
Between chapters 7-9, Ishamael enters two
different churches.
Compare the sermons delivered in each of
these churches.
The sermon preached in the black church is on “the blackness
of darkness,” suggesting that evil is impenetrable and cannot
be understood by human beings.
Father Mapple’s sermon about Jonah demands that people
heed God’s call and proclaim the truth even in the face of
great hostility, even when that truth goes against
conventional ways of thinking.
While the first sermon exemplifies the belief that the human
being’s power of understanding truth is extremely limited, the
second suggests that God gives humans the power to
apprehend truth, and that men and women should be so
confident in their vision of this truth as to defy any opposition.
Throughout Ishmael’s narrative, these two interpretations of
human understanding vie with one another for primacy.
Chapter Ten: A Bosom Friend
Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his
countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You
cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a
simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed
tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a
certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether
maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer
and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not
venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It
may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the
popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above
the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly
wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Ishmael is ultimately open-minded and befriends the “savage.”
Queequeg & Ishmael
He seemed to take to me
quite as naturally and
unbiddenly as I to him;
and when our smoke
was over, he pressed
his forehead against
mine, clasped me
round the waist, and
said that henceforth we
were married;
meaning, in his
country's phrase, that
we were bosom
friends; he would
gladly die for me, if
need should be.
Chapter Eleven: The Nightgown
Chapter Ten ends with: “there is no place like a bed for
confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they
say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other;
and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till
nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I
and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”
So what do we make of this? Why entitle Ch. 11
“The Nightgown?”
What do we really know about
Ishmael?
“Call me Ishmael.”
“...there is no quality in this world that is not what it is
merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”
Open-minded or Prejudiced?
And what is it, thought I, after
all! It’s only his outside; a
man can be honest in any
sort of skin. (3.54)
Ignorance is the parent of
fear.... (3.55)
What’s all this fuss I have been
making about, thought I to
myself -- the man’s a human
being just as I am; he has
just as much reason to fear
me, as I have to be afraid of
him. (3.69)
And what is the will of God? –
to do to my fellow man what
I would have my fellow man
to do to me – that is the will
of God. Now, Queequeg is
my fellow man. And what do
I wish that this Queequeg
would do to me? Why, unite
with me in my particular
Presbyterian form of
worship. Consequently, I
must then unite with him in
his; ergo, I must turn
idolator. (10.9)
Are we suppose to know?
The speculations on identity as composed of contrasts vs.
identity as a specific essence plays out in the philosophical
content of the novel.
In one view, everything is made of contrasting polarities, such
as good and evil, light and dark, heat and cold. Nothing
exists in itself in the world.
On the other hand, according to Transcendentalist philosophy
or religion, the soul has its specific and inviolable unitary
essence, which Ishmael knows when he closes his eyes in
the dark, thus blotting out contrasts.
Which is the truth, or are both ideas true?
Group Questions
•
What’s the point of Chapter Thirteen: The Wheelbarrow?
•
Find descriptions of the ocean. What message is Melville trying to
convey about the ocean? About mankind?
•
Find examples of foreshadowing. What to they seem to predict?
•
Why must it be Nantucket Ishmael sails from?
•
Examine the three captains descriptions. What is being suggested
here? What are we left wondering?
•
Melville uses humor heavily in Chapters 13-18. Find examples. What
type of humor is he using? Why?
•
Examples of Ishmael’s struggle with fate versus freewill?
•
References to historical, mythological, biblical events/texts/figures.
(Or to things you are not certain of.)
Chapter Thirteen: The
Wheelbarrow
Once again, Ishmael seems driven to make
Queequeg as relatable as possible. Thus,
the story of Queequeg's ignorance about
the purpose of a wheelbarrow is paired with
a tale about a sea Captain who mistakes a
punchbowl for a finger-glass. Interestingly,
Queequeg tales both tales. So clearly, he is
not ashamed of his former ignorance and is
humble enough not to mind sharing the tale
of his embarrassment with a close friend.
“...betokening that new cruises were on the start;
that one most perilous and long voyage ended,
only begins a second; and a second ended, only
begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye.
Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness
of all earthly effort.”
Ishmael is still pre-occupied with his quest to decide
between fate and freewill. Here, man has no
power to affect the world.
How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that
turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented
with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned
me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will
permit no records.
The sea is great, mysterious, and eternal. Furthermore,
it remains untouched, altered, or affected by man's
presence. Again, with man's powerlessness.
A “boom”
Foreshadowing
All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain
begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg
like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last
long dive.
Chapter Fourteen: Nantucket
“...two thirds of this
terraqueous globe are
the Nantucketer's. For
the sea is his; he owns
it, as Emperors own
empires; other seamen
having but a right of
way through it.”
… The Nantucketer, he alone
resides and riots on the
sea; he alone, in Bible
language, goes down to it
in ships; to and fro
ploughing it as his own
special plantation. THERE
is his home; THERE lies his
business, which a Noah's
flood would not interrupt,
though it overwhelmed all
the millions in China.”
Chapter Fifteen: Chowder
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended
by asses' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old topmast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the
cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this
old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I
was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
could not help staring at this gallows with a vague
misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to
the two remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for
Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin
my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and
here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are
these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
Tophet
Chapter Sixteen: The Ship
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All
noble things are touched with that.
"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a
harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump
after it? Answer, quick!"
"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to
do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I don't
take to be the fact."
The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous
and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of
common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though
refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against
land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic
and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed,
yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns
of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of
his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the
reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern
him much, and very probably he had long since come to the
sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one
thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays
dividends.
The Two Captains
he was brown and brawny, like
His own person was the exact
most old seamen, and heavily
embodiment of his utilitarian
rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut
character. On his long, gaunt
in the Quaker style; only there
body, he carried no spare
was a fine and almost
flesh, no superfluous beard,
microscopic net-work of the
his chin having a soft,
minutest wrinkles interlacing
economical nap to it, like the
round his eyes, which must have
worn nap of his broadarisen from his continual sailings
brimmed hat.
in many hard gales, and always
looking to windward;—for this
causes the muscles about the
eyes to become pursed
together. Such eye-wrinkles are
very effectual in a scowl.
Melville: The Jokester


First Ishmael mentions how both Captains
are Quakers, but then goes on to explain
they are “fighting Quakers” as they have
slaughtered 100s of whales. Quakers were
pacifists and conscientious objectors to
war and violence.
Bildad offers Ishmael the 777th lay. This is
a biblical number and Bildad is reading
Matthew 6:19 which advises people not to
lay up treasure on the earth.
Ahab
Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that
on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a
spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding
stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I
know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by
that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody—
desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all
pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee,
young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain
than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong
not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked
name.
Chapter Seventeen: The Ramadan
"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking
in the parlor;"
In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather
digressively; hell is an idea first born on an
undigested apple-dumpling; and since then
perpetuated through the hereditary
dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
Chapter Eighteen: His Mark
"I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg
there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of us belong;
the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all
belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the
grand belief; in THAT we all join hands.” ..."Young man, you'd better ship for a
missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon.'”
"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean
Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's
more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."
"The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,"
Chapter Nineteen: The Prophet
Elijah is a biblical prophet. According to the Books of
Kings, Elijah defended the worship of Yahweh over
that of the Phoenician god Baal (an idol); he raised
the dead, brought fire down from the sky, and was
taken up in a whirlwind (either accompanied by a
chariot and horses of flame or riding in it). In the
Book or Malachi, Elijah's return is prophesied
"before the coming of the great and terrible day of
the Lord.“
Elijah and Ahab have history. Ahab had been killing the
Lord’s prophets when Elijah arrives in his kingdom.
Ahab confronts Elijah upon his arrival, referring to
him as the "troubler of Israel." Elijah responds by
throwing the charge back at Ahab, saying that it is
Ahab who has troubled Israel by allowing the
worship of false gods. Elijah wins the battle of the
gods that they devise.
Ahab gets into further trouble when he follows his wife’s
suggestions and kills off those who trouble him.
Including the owners of land he covets. Elijah
predicts his demise: “dogs will lick his blood.”
Ahab
“…about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long
ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard
afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh?
Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And
nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to
the prophecy.”
Given the names, it’s pretty clear that Ahab killed a man before an altar in Catholic country. He was in a
church or a chapel, holy ground in any case. It is here, apparently, that he spits into a silver calabash.
A calabash is a type of gourd, one that looks like a bowl. In fact, calabashes are sometimes dried and
made into bowls. So Ahab spits into a bowl while before an altar in a Catholic holy setting. Could this
silver calabash have held the Eucharist?
Also possible: the calabash to be an allusion to the Book of Jonah. The sermon describes and
embellishes every part of the book save the last chapter. In that chapter Jonah starves himself outside
of Nineveh in the hot sun, God creates a gourd (or calabash) to provide Jonah shade. God than smites
the Gourd in a display of his power and it is implied that Jonah and God reconcile.
Foreshadowing
This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, halfrevealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague
wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the
Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape
Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of
him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the
squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a
hundred other shadowy things.
I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with
Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed
on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more,
and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a
humbug.
Chapter Twenty One: Going Abroad
—"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that
ship a while ago?"
Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered,
saying, "Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was
too dim to be sure."
…, "See if you can find 'em now, will ye?
"Find who?"
"Morning to ye! morning to ye! …Oh! I was going to warn ye
against—but never mind, …Good-bye to ye. Shan't see ye
again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand
Jury."
Chapter Twenty-Two:
Merry Christmas
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night
breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew
overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we
gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and
blindly plunged like fate into the lone
Atlantic.
Chapter Twenty-Three:
The Lee Shore
Wonderfullest things are ever the
unmentionable; deep memories yield no
epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the
stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only
say that it fared with him as with the stormtossed ship, that miserably drives along
the leeward land.
Leeward is the direction downwind from the point of reference. The side
of a ship that is towards the leeward is its lee side. If the vessel is
heeling under the pressure of the wind, this will be the "lower side".
“Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable
truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her
sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire
to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling
infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if
that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would
craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this
agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear
thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy oceanperishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”
Note: Apotheosis is the glorification of a subject to divine level.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ahab
Elijah:
…for my first vague disquietude touching the
unknown captain, now in the seclusion of
the sea, became almost a perturbation. This
was strangely heightened at times by the
ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences
uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle
energy I could not have before conceived
of.
Ahab
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,
nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut
away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly
wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking
away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.
His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze,
and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast
Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs,
and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched
face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a
slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.
Ahab
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a
determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the
fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that
glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers
say aught to him; though by all their minutest
gestures and expressions, they plainly showed
the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being
under a troubled master-eye. And not only that,
but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a
crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal
overbearing dignity of some mighty woe…
Chapter Thirty-One: Queen Mab
…well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and
when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my
little man, I kicked my leg right off! And
then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and
I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But
what was still more curious, Flask—you
know how curious all dreams are—through
all this rage that I was in, I somehow
seemed to be thinking to myself, that after
all, it was not much of an insult…
Stubb’s dream
… 'wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick
with right good will? it wasn't a common pitch pine leg he
kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man,
and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour; I
consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England
the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a
queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast,
Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise
man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him; account
his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you
can't help yourself, wise Stubb.
Chapter Thirty-Six:
The Quarter Deck
• Note the sudden shift in writing style
• Describe Ahab and his effect on the other
sailors
Ahab
…you could almost see that thought turn in
him as he turned, and pace in him as he
paced; so completely possessing him,
indeed, that it all but seemed the inward
mould of every outer movement.
"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb;
"the chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill
soon be out." (153)
More and more strangely and fiercely glad
and approving, grew the countenance of the
old man at every shout; while the mariners
began to gaze curiously at each other, as if
marvelling how it was that they themselves
became so excited at such seemingly
purposeless questions. (154)
Moby Dick
"Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed
whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked
jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that whiteheaded whale, with three holes punctured
in his starboard fluke- look ye, whosoever of
ye raises me that same white whale, he
shall have this gold ounce, my boys!" (155)
Starbuck
"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the
jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly
comes in the way of the business we follow;
but I came here to hunt whales, not my
commander's vengeance. How many
barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if
thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not
fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."
Vengence against?
If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach
outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale
is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught
beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him
outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That
inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent,
or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk
not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For
could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a
sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not
my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no
confines.
(Aside) “Something shot from my dilated
nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs.
Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me
now, without rebellion."
Ceremony
"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy
charged flagon to the nearest seaman. "The
crew alone now drink. Round with it, round!
Short draughts- long swallows, men; 'tis hot
as Satan's hoof. So, so; it goes round
excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at
the serpent-snapping eye….
Cross your lances full before me. Well done!
Let me touch the axis….
“Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who
are now made parties to this indissoluble league….
Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the
deathful whaleboat's bow- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt
us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long,
barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and
maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were
simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled,
and turned, and shivered.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sunset
Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly
spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No
more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all
loveliness is anguish to me, since I can
ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception,
I lack the low, enjoying power; damned,
most subtly and most malignantly! damned
in the midst of Paradise! Good night-good
night!
'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one
stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged
circle fits into all their various wheels, and
they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many
ant-hills of powder, they all stand before
me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire
others, the match itself must needs be
wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and
what I've willed, I'll do! They think me madStarbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am
madness maddened!
… come and see if ye can swerve me.
Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye
swerve yourselves! man has ye there.
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose
is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges,
through the rifled hearts of mountains,
under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush!
Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to
the iron way!
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Dusk
My soul is more than matched; she's over-manned;
and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity
should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled
deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I
think I see his impious end; but feel that I must
help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has
tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no
knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him, he
cries;- aye, he would be a democrat to all above;
look, how he lords it over all below!
Chapter Thirty-Nine:
First Night Watch
Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer
to all that's queer; and come what will, one
comfort's always left- that unfailing comfort
is, it's all predestinated.
…the old Mogul has fixed him, too.
Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be
coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it
laughing.
Chapter 40: Midnight, Forecastle
A storm!
• Multicultural group of sailors  prejudice 
knife fight
• Bad weather
•
•
A cloud like Ahab’s scar
Lashing down the deck to sail straight through
Gods and men at war
Chapter 41: Moby Dick
• Ishmael recognizes that sailors are prone
to exaggeration and says tails of M.D. have
already moved into the realm of legend and
supernatural; however, he also believes
that at the core these legends are based
on a truth that M.D. is extraordinary and
unusual (both in appearance and nature)
The Sperm Whale
“…to be a consternation to every other
creature in the sea, but also to be so
incredibly ferocious as continually to be
athirst for human blood. … that at sight of
the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included)
are ‘struck with the most lively terrors,’ and
‘often in the precipitancy of their flight dash
themselves against the rocks with such
violence as to cause instantaneous death’”
(174).
Moby Dick
•
“…declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal
(for immortality is but ubiquity in time)…” (175).
•
“…a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high,
pyramidical white hump” (176).
•
“Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable
hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much
invested the whale with natural terror, as that
unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to
specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in
his assaults…. seemed the White Whale's infernal
aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or
death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having
been inflicted by an unintelligent agent” (176).
Ahab on the White Whale
“Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell
for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not
only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till
they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible
malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the
modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient
Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall
down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by
his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a
mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it” (177).
Mad? …but…
“…even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is
oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it
may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's
full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated
Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably
through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania,
not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that
broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished.
That before living agent, now became the living instrument” (178).
“Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my means
are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or
change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long
dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was
only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate” (179).
Possessed
“How it was that they so aboundingly
responded to the old man's ire- by what evil
magic their souls were possessed, that at
times his hate seemed almost theirs; the
White Whale as much their insufferable foe
as his…” (180).
Chapter Forty-Two:
The Whiteness of the Whale
“…there was another thought, or rather
vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely
overpowered all the rest; and yet so
mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I
almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form. It was the whiteness
of the whale that above all things appalled
me” (181).
Whiteness
Ishmael acknowledges all the good and holy
associations of the color but says even at
its ‘best’ within the color “there yet lurks an
elusive something in the innermost idea of
this hue, which strikes more of panic to the
soul than that redness which affrights in
blood” (182).
Whiteness con…
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the
heartless voids and immensities of the universe,
and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of
annihilation, when beholding the white depths of
the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence
whiteness is not so much a color as the visible
absence of color; and at the same time the
concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that
there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning,
in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, allcolor of atheism from which we shrink?
“…the great principle of
light, for ever remains
white or colorless in
itself, and if operating
without medium upon
matter, would touch all
objects, even tulips and
roses, with its own blank
tinge- pondering all this,
the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and
coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel
gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that
wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then
at the fiery hunt?
Chapter Forty-Three
"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?.... There it is
again- under the hatches- don't you hear it- a
cough- it sounded like a cough."
"Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."
"There again- there it is!- it sounds like two or three
sleepers turning over, now!.... Hark ye, Cabaco,
there is somebody down in the after-hold that has
not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old
Mogul knows something of it too” (189-190).
Chapter: 47 The Mat-Maker
“I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over
the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as
if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving
and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject
to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely
enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This
warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own
shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,
or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference
in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of
the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes
and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chanceaye, chance, free will, and necessity- wise incompatible- all interweavingly
working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
ultimate course- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free
will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though
restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its
motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns
rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events” (207).
“There she blows!”
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and
eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him
some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those
wild cries announcing their coming.
"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"
"Where-away?"
"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"
Instantly all was commotion.
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from
other tribes of his genus.
(208)
Ch. 48: The First Lowering
• Describe how each mate encourages his
crew differently.
• What distinguishes Ahab’s crew?
Signing up yet?
“Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom
of his wife into the fever heat of his first
battle; not the dead man's host
encountering the first unknown phantom in
the other world;- neither of these can feel
stranger and stronger emotions than that
man does, who for the first time finds
himself pulling into the charmed, churned
circle of the hunted sperm whale” (217).
Abandon all hope,
ye who enter here…
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg,
after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the
lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif
pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standardbearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat,
holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that
almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign
and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly
holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Chapter 50: Ahab’s Boat and Crew.
Fedallah
"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that
account," said Flask. "If his leg were off at
the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
That would disable him; but he has one
knee, and good part of the other left, you
know."
"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet
saw him kneel."
(221-222)
Chapter 77:
The Great Heidelburgh Tun
The Heidelberg Tun is an extremely large
wine vat contained within the cellars of
Heidelberg Castle.
In 1751, the year of its construction, the
present one had a capacity of 221,726
litres (58,573.8125 U.S. gallons). Due to
the drying of the wood its current
capacity is 219,000 litres (57,853.6795
U.S. gallons).
One hundred and thirty oak trees were
reputedly used in its construction.
It has only rarely been used as a wine
barrel, and in fact presently enjoys more
use as a tourist attraction, and also as a
dance floor since one was constructed
on top of the tun.
Chapter 87: The Grand Armanda
(or perhaps: The Chase of Whales and Pirates)
“Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at
the strangely gallied whales before us, for
there is no folly of the beast of the earth
which is not infinitely outdone by the
madness of men” (372).
“Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm
which they say lurks at the heart of every
commotion” (374).
“Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to
us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan
amours in the deep.
…. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do
I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round
me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in
eternal mildness of joy” (376).
Queequeg’s hat
This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased
by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while
standing in the bows to prick the fugitive
whales, had his hat taken clean from his
head by the air-eddy made by the sudden
tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.
Riotous and disordered as the universal
commotion now was, it soon resolved itself
into what seemed a systematic
movement… (378).
Chapter 93: The Castaway
(Pip)
“ ‘We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale
would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.
Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more.’ Hereby
perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his
fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which
propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped
again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first
performance; but this time he did not breast out the line;
and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left
behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk” (400).
Power of the Sea
“Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open
ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer
as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But
the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The
intense concentration of self in the middle of
such a heartless immensity, my God! who
can tell it?” (401).
“By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but
from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot;
such, at least, they said he was. The sea had leeringly kept
his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not
drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to
wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped
primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and
the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps;
and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip
saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that
out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He
saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it;
and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's
insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal
reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to
reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then
uncompromised, indifferent as his God” (401-402).
Chapter 110:
Queequeg in His Coffin
“But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones
grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed
growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange
softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked
out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous
testimony to that immortal health in him which
could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on
the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so
his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the
rings of Eternity” (460).
“With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his
body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and
seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out
on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his
own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one
volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his
own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment
whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this
thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild
exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying
poor Queequeg- ‘Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!’ (464)."
Chapter Ninety-Four:
A Squeeze of the Hand
“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that
sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as
much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer
cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!
Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze
ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into
the very milk and sperm of kindness” (403).
Chapter Ninety-Five:
The Cassock
“Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and
assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners
call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a
grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon
the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark
pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt
inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost
to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging,
to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it,
towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes
at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer
now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.
Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately
protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office”
(406).
Chapter Ninety-Six:
The Try-Works
“By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear
from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was
freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that
darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at
intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated
every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly
commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and
sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris,
issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of
flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
folded them in conflagrations” (408).
“…the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and
dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell
further and further into the blackness of the
sea and the night, and scornfully champed
the white bone in her mouth, and viciously
spat round her on all sides; then the rushing
Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden
with fire, and burning a corpse, and
plunging into that blackness of darkness,
seemed the material counterpart of her
monomaniac commander's soul” (409).
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O
man! Never dream with thy hand on the
helm! Turn not thy back to the compass;
accept the first hint of the hitching tiller;
believe not the artificial fire, when its
redness makes all things look ghastly”
(410).
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert
thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a
woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill
eagle in some souls that can alike dive
down into the blackest gorges, and soar out
of them again and become invisible in the
sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies
within the gorge, that gorge is in the
mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop
the mountain eagle is still higher than other
birds upon the plain, even though they soar”
(411).
Chapter Fifty-Three
The Gam
• What is a gam?
• What typically happens on a gam?
(Be sure to note how the gams in the
subsequent chapters are unique.)
Chapter 52: The Albatross
Note the odd behavior of the fish & Ahab’s
reaction.
Ishmael’s final thoughts:
“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward
we could for ever reach new distances, and discover
sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or
Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the
voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of,
or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some
time or other, swims before all human hearts; while
chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on
in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed” (230).
Ch. 71,81,91, &100
CH. 71 Jeroboam’s Story ~ the plague,
Gabriel, and the letter
CH. 81 The Pequod Meets the Virgin ~ a
empty ship, “the life,” & a sinking whale
CH. 91 The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud ~
irony of the name, blasted whale, &
ambergris
CH. 100 Samuel Enderby (London) ~ club
hammer & magnet
CH. 115,128, &131
CH. 115 The Pequod Meets the Bachelor ~
fullship & Nantucket sand
CH. 128 The Pequod Meets the Rachel ~ a
business offer & a missing boy
CH. 131 The Pequod meets the Delight ~
Irony of name, & a baptism
CH. 106: Ahab’s leg
“For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly
felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness
lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a
mystic significance, and, in some men, an
archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracingsout not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the
genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries
us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of
the gods” (448).
CH. 107 The Carpenter
“For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal
stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the
surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general
stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly
active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores
you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this halfhorrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
heartlessness” (451).
“And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him;
this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only
like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or
rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there,
and talking all the time to keep himself awake” (452).
CH. 108 Ahab and the Carpenter
“Well, manmaker! …
No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel
something in this slippery world that can
hold, man. What's Prometheus about
there?- the blacksmith, I mean- what's he
about?” (453).
“What was that now about one leg standing in
three places, and all three places standing
in one hell- how was that? Oh! I don't
wonder he looked so scornful at me! I'm a
sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they
say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a
short, little old body like me, should never
undertake to wade out into deep water with
tall, heron-built captains” (456).
Ch. 109 Ahab and Starbuck in the
Cabin
“Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack
(forming part of most South-Sea-men's
cabin furniture), and pointing it towards
Starbuck, exclaimed: ‘There is one God that
is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that
is lord over the Pequod.- On deck!’" (458).
“’… let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of
thyself, old man’" (458).
Ch.117 The Whale Watch
"I have dreamed it again," said he.
"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin
can be thine?...But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this
voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first
not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must
be grown in America."
…..
"And what was that saying about thyself?"
"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."
“…I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."
"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
like fire-flies in the gloom- "Hemp only can kill thee."
"The gallows, ye mean.- I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried
Ahab, with a laugh of derision;- "Immortal on land and on sea!"
CH. 118 The Quadrant
"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full
of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last,
down,down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery
life ofthine, what will at length remain but one little heap of
ashes!"
"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr.
Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I
heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into
these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no
others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the
game, and die in it!"
Ch. 119
• Significance of three’s
• Fire symbolism
• Ahab’s defiance (486)
Chapter 123: The Musket
& Chapter 124: The Needle
• Starbuck’s dilemma
• Inversion of needles
“In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you
then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride” (498).
Chapter 125: The Log and Line
& Chapter 126: The Life-Buoy
• Why are Pip and Ahab suddenly so close?
What similarities do they share? What
differences?
• What is the life-bouy made of?
• Who is it used for? With what result?
Significance?
Chapter 130: The Hat
“So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not
unusual; the only strange thing about them
seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only
man who had ever ventured to oppose him with
anything in the slightest degree approaching to
decision- one of those too, whose faithfulness on
the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat; it
was strange, that this was the very man he should
select for his watchman; freely giving his whole
life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands” (516).
“An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head,
removing his cap to replace it, and
thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that
Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by
the replacing of the cap was that omen
accounted good. Ahab's hat was never
restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with
it; far in advance of the prow: and at last
disappeared; while from the point of that
disappearance, a minute black spot was
dimly discerned, falling from that vast height
into the sea” (516).
Chapter 132: The Symphony
Opening passages  duality of nature
“From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a
tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain
such wealth as that one wee drop” (519).
"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old
heart, after all! why should any one give chase to
that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these
deadly waters! let us home!...” (521).
“But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook,
and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless
emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and
longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself
on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own
proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab,
Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun
move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one
single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then
can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts;
unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round
in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike….’
But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen
away” (521-522).
Chapter 133:
The Chase— First Day
“…he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in
drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared
that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar
odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by
the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the
watch” (522).
Ahab’s senses are beyond the ordinary sailors
“There she blows! …It is Moby Dick!”
•
Ahab’s doubloon
•
Moby Dick’s destruction
•
Ahab falls into the sea
•
No harpoons or men lost (yet)
•
Ahab’s obsessive pacing
“Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is
Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all
mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the
peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold- I
shiver!” (530).
Chapter 134:
The Chase –Second Day
“The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls…. The wind that
made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by
arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that
unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them
all; though it was put together of all contrasting things- oak, and
maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp- yet all these
ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its
way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even
so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's
fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness,
and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord
and keel did point to” (533-534).
What imagery!
“That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush
among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by
so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved
boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes;
dashed them together like two rolling husks on a
surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the
sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which,
for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the
wrecks danced round and round, like the grated
nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch” (536).
• More broken boats and limbs but Ahab is
unfazed…
"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!- d'ye see
it.- But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is
untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one
jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor
white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as
graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible
being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast
scrape yonder roof?- Aloft there! which way?"
(537).
The Parsee (Fedallah) disappears.
“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's
immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by
thee and me a billion years before this
ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates'
lieutenant; I act under orders” (539).
Chapter 135:
The Chase –Third Day
“Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but
Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's
tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity.
God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is,
or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and
our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too
much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my
brain was very calm- frozen calm, this old skull
cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned
to ice, and shiver it” (540).
The Wind
“Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd
crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and
heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the
last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha!
a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to
receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing- a nobler thing than
that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most
exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but
only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most
cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and
swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in the
wind” (541).
Ahab’s Goodbyes (542-543)
"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."
"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."
"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
Starbuck!"
"Truth, sir: saddest truth."
"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
flood;- and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb,
Starbuck. I am old;- shake hands with me, man."
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
"Oh, my captain, my captain!- noble heart- go not- go not!- see, it's a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"
"Lower away!"-cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by for
the crew!"
Starbuck’s Goodbye
“Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through
me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
expectant,- fixed at the top of a shudder!
Future things swim before me, as in empty
outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow
grown dim. Mary, girl; thou fadest in pale
glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy
eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest
problems of life seem clearing; but clouds
sweep between- Is my journey's end coming?”
(544).
The Parsee Returns
“Lashed round and round to the fish's back;
pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
during the past night, the whale had reeled
the involutions of the lines around him, the
half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his
sable raiment frayed to shreds; his
distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand” (545).
Moby Dick, Sharks,
Hearses, and Hemp
"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye
three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull;
thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,- death- glorious ship!
must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of
meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my
topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds,
pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled
comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering
whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake
I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee,
though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the
line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but
the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes
bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.
Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty
tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.
(550)
The Pequod’s End
“…this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the
hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill,
the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer
frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and
his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in
the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not
sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her,
and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (551).
Epilogue
“…the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea,
fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by
that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I
floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The
unharming sharks, they glided by as if with
padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks
sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a
sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It
was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her
retracing search after her missing children, only
found another orphan” (552).