" p. 162 Ahab has taken the power and autonomy given to him as a ship's captain and set himself against God and nature over the loss of his leg. It is this hubris that will bring the Pequod to her doom.
By the end of the novel, Captain Ahab seems to realize that even as great as he apparently thinks he is, he may not be able to master Moby-Dick. Even at this point, he cannot humble himself and admit that some forces may be greater than him. He says, "By heavens man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and fate is the handspike." (p. 536) He has shown a belief in fate, bringing on board a man who seems to be a sooth-sayer, and who predicts Captain Ahab's death, and the predictions seem to be coming true. This is convenient for Captain Ahab; he can still be great even though he can't conquer fate. Who can?
After three frustrating and dangerous days, it is left to Captain Ahab himself to harpoon the beast. He is quite willing to do this. This makes the reader wonder once again why Captain Ahab is so driven. The whale has really not harmed him. He survived a horrible injury long before we had good surgical methods or antibiotics. While he does have a "peg leg," he gets around well enough to captain a whaling ship through even the roughest seas. There is little he can't do; he can even get down into a whaling boat and go on the hunt himself, throw the harpoon that will bring a mighty animal down. So where is his real loss, after all? Perhaps the pain he had to endure drove him mad, or the experience of being attacked by such a huge animal, but maybe he was just a man with a colossal ego and a remarkably unforgiving nature.
The book suggests that...
Moby Dick and Nature, How Nature Displays an Indomitable Force Moby-Dick provides different conducts of human beings towards nature. Melville presents a sea animals' world with a white whale as the focus of the narrative and a society represented through the Pequod. Through underlining the conflict between the Pequod, and the white whale, the author of the novel makes a unique, thorough and intensive check out into the link amid human
Moby Dick In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the character of Captain Ahab is repeatedly referred to as a "monomaniac" (Melville Chapter 41). In other words, he is a man obsessively devoted to and possessed by a single idea -- to get revenge upon the white whale, Moby Dick. To some extent, Ahab views his long-sought encounter with the whale as his own personal fate: it is clear from Melville's depiction that
.. (is) blasphemous!" (pg. #). This is yet another foreshadowing device, for it shows that Moby Dick is nothing but an animal with no conscience and that Ahab's need for revenge will inevitably lead to his own death and that of the entire crew aboard the Pequod. In a very moving moment in the chapter "The Musket," Starbuck's moral ethics are put to the supreme test, for after a severe typhoon,
Queequeg's Coffin There are a thousands different ways for a man to lose himself and his soul - and a number of ways for him to be saved. Herman Melville presents us over the course of his work with a dozen different ways in which men find and lose and sometimes find themselves again. For Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, the way to life and to perhaps even hope is
Melville and Irving The dawn of the American nation brought with it a need for a decidedly American culture, one depicted with careful precision by many of the authors that came to paint the literary landscape of the new magnate across the Atlantic. Washington Irving, the first American great, told the story of the nascent, colonial United States through youthful folklore limned with great detail and attention to the inner workings
Melville and Clarel Introduction Herman Melville is typically mostly known for his novel Moby-Dick, but the prose writer turned to poetry in his later years after his novels (following Moby-Dick) failed to be best-sellers. Poetry, it was thought, would be a creative outlet for him that would refresh his reading audience and spark new life into his readership and following. The attempt failed to produce much of anything in the way of
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