Response Journal Week 10 - Caleb

As Gabriel noticed in his response journal, Ahab’s madness seems to be piquing in these chapters, which contain the most action and dialogue we’ve seen in perhaps the entire book. We learn a lot about each character, more than we’ve ever learned before. Starbuck, for example, shows the most resistance to Ahab. He seems to be the only one who is questioning Ahab’s iron rule. He even ponders shooting Ahab for the good of the ship which, to me, was a really powerful and interesting scene. Starbuck wonders “Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?” (387) Another interesting point about character development: where has Ishmael gone? In this reading, the narrator seems to be omniscient, yet part of the crew. It’s amazing how Melville balances those two aspects out, making it seems all-knowing and yet familiar at the same time.
Another thing I noticed about these chapters is that Ahab’s monomania is slowly devolving (or evolving) into a sort of megalomania. His quest for the Great White Whale has gotten him a sort of god complex. Saying things like “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod!” (362), and claiming mastery over the poles, Ahab seems to have promoted his quest from whale domination to world domination.
Melville also reintroduces his theme of the outwardly pleasant, yet inwardly dangerous in these chapters. He writes that “…when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.” (372) He uses the metaphor of the tiger again later in the reading to the same effect, when he states that “Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.” (379) All of this adds to the extremely ominous tone that Melville sets in these chapters, starting with the Pequod’s encounter with the fortuitous “Bachelor”. Of this encounter, Melville writes, “…while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against it.” (375). This once again implies that, in chasing Moby-Dick, Ahab is somehow going against the natural order of things.
Finally, two passages in this reading caught my eye as extremely poignant and well-written:
“…but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remore, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored…” (369)
“Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it” (373)