Moby Dick

When Pip leaps overboard in Chapter 93, Stubb tells him he must never do such a thing again, or else he’ll be left behind. Of course, Pip, being young and inexperienced fails to take Stubb’s advice to heart, and ends up reacting similarly in a situation quite reminiscent of the first. While it’s unclear whether Stubb was being wholly serious in his threats to truly leave Pip behind, he does do just that (probably thinking another of the boats would pick him up), which results in Pip becoming “another lonely castaway” at sea for a considerable amount of time. The Pequod eventually picked him up, but the cheerful Pip was forever changed from that day on. The crew described him from then on as going “about the deck an idiot” (Melville 401). But Ishmael understood Pip’s drastic change rather differently.

“Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad” (402).

According to Ishmael, Pip came to a greater understanding of the world, something deeper, so mind-altering, that he could no longer communicate through simple exchange, which then made him seem deranged to others on the ship. The vulnerability Pip felt as he bobbed alone in the vast sea opened his mind to God-like truths. And those truths are so foreign to us that we liken someone such as Pip to be crazy, when really what we’re interpreting as “man’s insanity is heaven’s sense” (402). While we can’t know this as fact, Ishmael’s more thoughtful (and possibly optimistic) take on Pip’s condition most prominently points to his continued reverence of the sea and its capabilities.

The sea didn’t physically swallow Pip, but his soul seemed to have been. It drowned it, but not fatalistically—the sea “carried [Pip’s soul] down alive to wondrous depths” where he was granted access to all the “joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities” (402). It’s interesting that Ishmael finds the sea so rich and vast, holding many truths, yet he also considers it heartless, as if man must give up his emotions to understand the depths of the world. The omnipresent ocean can reveal to man the absurdity of his life, but only when he lets go of his emotional ties, or in Pip’s case, when he is forced to let go and engage in “the intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity” (401).

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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