{"id":1136,"date":"2010-03-01T07:14:19","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T11:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2010-03-01T07:14:19","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T11:14:19","slug":"captain-ahabs-religious-duplicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1136","title":{"rendered":"Captain Ahab&#8217;s Religious Duplicity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Chapter 132, <em>The Symphony, <\/em>Captain Ahab and his crew look out to the sky, which is filled with flying birds and a clear blue sky.\u00a0 This view of the sky is depicted as peaceful and serene.\u00a0 However, below the ocean lies the trouble and true danger.\u00a0 The sharks, \u201cmighty Leviathans\u201d and swordfish lie there (page 774).\u00a0 Also at this time, Captain Ahab begins to grow weary and fearful on his journey to kill the White Whale.\u00a0 This fear from Captain Ahab goes against Christian faith because Christian faith states that one must not fear anything and one must have faith in their most dire and tiresome journeys.\u00a0\u00a0 Captain Ahab begins to lose his faith and therefore is losing his Christian faith as well.\u00a0 \u201cSlowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul\u201d (775).\u00a0 This quote shows how Captain Ahab begins to lose his strength and faith as it figuratively begins to sink into the abyss of the sea.\u00a0 However, Captain Ahab also maintains some little faith as he enjoys smelling the scents in the air out on sea and this lovely scent purges that lack of faith from him. Interestingly enough he is both religious and irreligious because he struggles to completely maintain Christian faith and to relinquish Christian faith.\u00a0 Captain Ahab even beings to cry into the sea.\u00a0 Captain Ahab converses with Starbuck regarding his feelings and emotions.\u00a0 Ahab says, \u201cOh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.\u00a0 \u2026 But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise\u201d (page 777).\u00a0 This quotation reinforces the fact that Captain Ahab is truly feeling drained and exhausted from his long journey and quest to kill the White Whale.\u00a0 Ahab also feels weary of this quest and begins to question whether or not he can fulfill his desire to exact revenge on the White Whale or to fulfill his desire of attaining peace and serenity.\u00a0 The fact that Captain Ahab wavers between these two opposing sides shows that he is religiously duplicitous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Chapter 132, The Symphony, Captain Ahab and his crew look out to the sky, which is filled with flying birds and a clear blue sky.\u00a0 This view of the sky is depicted as peaceful and serene.\u00a0 However, below the ocean lies the trouble and true danger.\u00a0 The sharks, \u201cmighty Leviathans\u201d and swordfish lie there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","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=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}