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Moby Dick Chapter 38 Dusk

#106: Mar. - May 2012 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Moby Dick Chapter 38 Dusk

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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/270 ... m#2HCH0038

Brief ruminations from Starbuck:
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! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! ... Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon.
And if you were wondering what a demigorgon is, here is a picture.

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Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Apr 25, 2012 3:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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DWill

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Re: Moby Dick Chapter 38 Dusk

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These 4 chapters of monologues without narration are an interesting technique of Melville's. I wonder that more fiction writers don't use it. It's an economical way to advance the characterizations if not the plot. The Elizabethan-drama parallel is strong. I think we recognize that in life, a person in Starbuck's position wouldn't be telling us of his thralldom to Ahab in such explicit terms, but Melville makes the Pequod a stage on which such heightened tellings are imaginable and become the baseline for his work.

I'm not sure that Ahab is a tragic figure in MD. Maybe we'll be discussing that. His monomania seems too self-willed to garner the essential element of the audience's sympathy for him. Starbuck, though, is clearly a noble man brought down by a fatal flaw. Melville/Ish says in Chap. 26: "And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery, chiefly visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with the seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man."
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