{"id":1127,"date":"2010-03-02T22:01:36","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T02:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1127"},"modified":"2010-03-02T22:01:36","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T02:01:36","slug":"the-spirit-spout-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1127","title":{"rendered":"The spirit-spout"},"content":{"rendered":"

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The whale also seems to represent death in this chapter as it does commonly throughout the novel.\u00a0 Also, I found it very interesting that Ishmael described Abab’s dead leg as sounding like a coffin-tap.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Ishmael knows what a coffin-tap sounds like because of Queequeg’s coffin.\u00a0 In this chapter, the seas is also described in a dark way- Ishmael often refers to is as the black sea.\u00a0 Interestingly enough, many of the crew will die at the hands of this “black sea” by drowning.<\/p>\n

“…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.\u00a0 But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing it’s fountain of feathers to the sky; the solitary jet would at times be descried.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found this particular passage of interest for a number of reasons.\u00a0 For one, Ishmael describes the crew as being “launched into this tormented sea”\u00a0 where things are “condemned to swim on everlastingly,” one cannot help but see this as a foreshadowing of eventual fate of The Pequod.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1197,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions\/1197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}