Quote 1
"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave." (36.32)
Apart from the fact that Khan gets to quote some of these lines in Star Trek II, this is an important passage because it’s the first time that Captain Ahab admits that he’s on a wild quest for revenge against Moby Dick. We’re a little concerned that he’s willing to go, not just to the ends of the earth, but also to Hell itself—"perdition’s flames." If Ahab wants to pursue his white whale all the way to damnation, he might need to be careful what he wishes for.
Quote 2
"[B]ut what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?"
"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." (36.34-35)
Melville immediately sets up Starbuck as a rational counterpoint to Ahab. While Captain Ahab sees revenge as an end in itself, Starbuck is always going to be there to do a broader cost-benefit analysis. It’s immediately apparently to Starbuck—and to the reader—that the sacrifices Ahab is willing to make in order to achieve his revenge literally aren’t worth the price. The Pequod could make a lot more money just hunting whatever whales it finds and staying clear of the really dangerous ones.
Quote 3
Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
"No, no – no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. (113.14-26)
Forging a harpoon in human blood in a demonic parody of the baptismal ceremony, Ahab proclaims in fancy pseudo-church Latin, "I baptize you, not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil!"
Finally, he’s directly admitted (okay, saying it in Latin isn’t all that direct) that throwing away every other aspect of his life and focusing on revenge is sacrilegious. It might seem weird that he wants to use human blood to create the harpoon that will strike Moby Dick, but, if you think about it, any tool used for hunting the White Whale seems to get covered in human blood sooner or later!
Quote 4
"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!" (135.58)
Some of these lines also get quoted in Star Trek II! Ahab’s declaration that he’s going to keep battling the whale with all his strength, even after he knows he’s doomed, has the same significance in both Star Trek and in Moby-Dick.
Khan goes after Kirk for the same reason Ahab goes after the White Whale: because he hates him, not because it’s a glorious quest or even because he wants to win. Khan and Ahab both do want to win, of course, but nourishing their own revenge is more important than mere victory.
Quote 5
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!" (109.15)
As the novel moves toward its fateful conclusion, Ahab finally says the very thing that we (and Starbuck) have been worried about: that he’s setting himself up in opposition to God. It’s too bad Ahab wasn’t there to hear Father Mapple’s sermon about Jonah and how obeying God means disobeying yourself.
Quote 6
"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 as 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. (132.17)
Even Captain Ahab himself doesn’t really understand what’s driving him. Is he pressed onward by his own desires? By God’s decisions? After all, if you believe in God, then isn’t God responsible, directly or indirectly, for everything everyone does? And, if so, does that mean nobody is responsible for their own actions? Surely not. But Ahab doesn’t seem to be trying to claim that he isn’t responsible for what he does—he seems scared that he might not be.
Quote 7
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. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine. (134.43)
In the previous passage, the question "Is Ahab, Ahab?" implied that the presence of a divinely ordained destiny or fate would mean that Ahab isn’t Ahab—that he’s just an extension of God’s will. But in this passage, a complete reliance on Fate goes hand-in-hand with the assertion that "Ahab is for ever Ahab." So the real question is, are we more ourselves when we behave the way we’ve been programmed to by fate, or when we defy destiny and act in unusual ways?
Quote 8
What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad – Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and – Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. (37.4)
Ahab’s ability to do his own psychoanalysis shows us the limits of his insanity. Even though his object is crazy, he’s able to find sane ways of evaluating and reaching it. So, if you know you’re crazy, are you crazy?
Quote 9
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. [. . .] 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. (41.19)
Here we’re introduced to Ahab’s monomania, his single-minded fixation on the White Whale. Basically, what’s driven Ahab crazy is that he’s not very good at symbolism. As a clever Shmoop reader, you know that things don’t just symbolize whatever you decide to make them mean; the limits of their symbolic potential are determined by context. But Ahab takes the White Whale out of context and projects onto it everything that’s enraged any human being ever.
Nothing can really hold all that symbolic weight. Not even an inscrutable white whale.
Quote 10
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. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. (41.20)
Insane Ahab isn’t just a different man from sane Ahab—he’s sane Ahab plus. It’s not a transformation that he goes through, but a process of addition: everything that Ahab was before, plus monomania.
Quote 11
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. [. . .] 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 colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. (44.11)
In this freaky sleepwalking scene, we see that Ahab’s madness has become a sort of living thing all its own, something that can inhabit his body even when his soul isn’t there. So he doesn’t have a soul tainted by vengeance; instead, his soul seems to have been imprisoned by his obsession with revenge.
Quote 12
"What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, Sir."
"So it is, so it is; if we get it."
"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, Sir."
"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale?" (109.6-9)
Here Ahab gives the impression that he’s capable of snapping out of his madness, or "plugging his leak," if he wanted to, but that it’s so difficult as to be nearly impossible—and he doesn’t want to anyway. It’s interesting to think about whether Ahab is indulging in his madness on purpose.
Quote 13
In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad? (113.4)
Again Ahab presents madness as a choice—here, he suggests that it’s the only reasonable reaction to the unreasonable suffering that human beings have to endure in the world.
Quote 14
"Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down."
"What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, Sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, Sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go."
"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!"
"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness." (125.26-29)
Ahab and Pip, mad in their different ways, make an ideal pairing. Like Shakespeare's King Lear and his fool (see what Shmoop has to say on King Lear), together they become the tragic hero who falls into a bout of madness and the goofy madman who still manages to be wiser than his master.
Quote 15
[Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.] "Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health." (129.1)
In fact, Pip is so good at touching Ahab’s heart, and making Ahab aware of uncomfortable truths about the spiritual nature of the world, that Ahab has to cast him off in order to go on with his crazy revenge quest. With Pip in the cabin and Ahab on the deck for the last section of the novel, it’s as though the captain has split into two different selves, each mad in its own weird way.