Response Journal Week 8- Caleb

Though this might seem trivial, I’ve noticed that Melville has started using the work predestinated an awful lot. This adds to Melville’s idea of fate, which he is constantly returning to throughout the novel. Another short point: after reading Stubb’s advice to Pip to “Stick to the boat” (320), I couldn’t help but remember the similar advice given in “Apocalypse Now”. Here’s a link to that scene.
The “stay on the boat” mentality is especially resonant for the novel. Taken metaphorically, it can be seen as monomaniac’s mantra. If, as Melville often does, we see the boat as a metaphor for a human life, Stubb’s advice is particularly useful for keeping sane in the face of insanity (something which the crew of the Pequod deals with a lot).
Again, we see another Transcendental allusion, which metaphorically links the ocean to God, when Pip is left behind in the water. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul,” (321) Melville writes of post-abandonment Pip, who catatonically paces the deck. Melville explains that “Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.” (321). This passage returns to Melville’s differentiation between the body and the soul, a theme which he stresses throughout the novel. It also makes the transcendentalist connection between nature and man, allowing the ocean to function once again as a metaphor for life, death, and the infinite. One thing Matthiesson points out, however, is Melville’s divergence from Emersonian and Thoreauean (that’s a lot of vowels) Transcendentalism. “He agreed that spirit is substance, but when he contemplated the mystery of the unseen, he began to diverge from the transcendental conclusion that its effect on man was necessarily beneficient” (405). Matthiesson argues that this is what sets Melville’s philosophy apart from other philosophers from the era. Melville recognizes “the demonic element in the unseen” (406)--- that “beautiful fins were part of cruel form”, not just believing in the inspirational value of nature.
“The Doubloon” chapter was also extremely interesting. Each character, when observing Ahab’s reward doubloon, interprets it differently. Pip, although he’s become insane, recognizes this, and states, “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” (335), which Stubb takes as nonsense. Stubb makes a similar comment when referring to his book: “Book! You lie there; the face is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts” (333). Here, Melville is expressing the nature of art; that the words on the page of a book have different meanings from person to person. Additionally, Melville writes about the inverse—the art of nature--- in the same way. In Matthiesson, Melville writes, “Saw what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selective and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson…” (406)