Mar 02 2010
The spirit-spout
“And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead leg sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.”
I chose to post about this passage specifically as well as the chapter “The Spirit-Spout” because of the way it use contrasting concepts to talk about some things while hinting at several general themes in the book. The description of Ahab’s two feet can be read as a play on life and death, and there are a lot of things in this chapter signaling death and doom as well. The whale also seems to represent death in this chapter as it does commonly throughout the novel. Also, I found it very interesting that Ishmael described Abab’s dead leg as sounding like a coffin-tap. As well as another hint towards death this foreshadows not only the building of Queequeg’s coffin, but also that this coffin ends up saving Ishmael in the end. Ishmael knows what a coffin-tap sounds like because of Queequeg’s coffin. In this chapter, the seas is also described in a dark way- Ishmael often refers to is as the black sea. Interestingly enough, many of the crew will die at the hands of this “black sea” by drowning.
“…we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without an haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing it’s fountain of feathers to the sky; the solitary jet would at times be descried.”
I found this particular passage of interest for a number of reasons. For one, Ishmael describes the crew as being “launched into this tormented sea” where things are “condemned to swim on everlastingly,” one cannot help but see this as a foreshadowing of eventual fate of The Pequod. Also, Ahab had previously described the sea as black whereas here he uses black to talk about the air. However, he uses “snow-white” here and previously used “silvery” to tell us about the spirit spout and this passage led me to notice that in this chapter most things are described as dark or black besides the spout. This again leads me to think that this is another hint towards life and death and also good and evil, the sea and other things being death and evil but the white spout representing good or life.
One Response to “The spirit-spout”
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I posted on the same passage you posted on above (the first one) and I think it’s interesting to see similar but also different points brought up. I focused a great deal on the life/death duality expressed in the image of Ahab, connecting it to Ahab’s struggle with his own spirituality. However, I did not pick up on the passage’s intermingling of the different characters: Ahab stomping on the deck, foreshadowing the building of Queequeg’s coffin, which actually saves Ishmael’s life. I think this clear intermingling of Ahab’s life/death duality with Queequeg and Ishmael’s fate is further a commentary on how intermingled Ahab’s actions are with the fates of the other characters on board. Furthermore, Ahab is walking on the item of foreshadowing (the deck). This might be a bit of a stretch, but perhaps this shows how Ahab is not only intermingled with, but in control of Queequeg and Ishmael’s (and others’) fates while they are on board the ship. The passage says, “on life and death this old man walked”. This does not only mean the life and death within Ahab, but the life and death represented by Queequeg’s coffin, and also the life and death of Queequeg and Ishmael themselves, as well as the entire crew.