\n| And handled with a chain.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/blockquote>\n without the funky font of “UCH,” though more obviously applicable to Ahab, (except, I suppose,\u00a0that Ahab has authority over his ship\u00a0and can “run” with his madness) can also be applied to the minor character, Pip, the slight slave-boy driven to madness.\u00a0 In the saddest part of the book thus far for me, Pip jumps from the boat to catch a whale and is left floundering\u00a0in the ocean for what is\u00a0beyond a mere scare tactic\u00a0after Stubb\u00a0warns\u00a0Pip that\u00a0he won’t save him a second time because\u00a0“a whale would sell thirty more times than [Pip] would in Alabama,” and is not worth the trouble or energy (400). \u00a0<\/p>\n In “The Doubloon,” every major character gives his thought\u00a0on the doubloon while looking at it, and ends up, as Ahab said during his soliloquy, “mirror[ing] back his own mysterious self” (416).\u00a0Indeed, the men,\u00a0supposedly probing the doubloon, really just reveal themselves, their\u00a0philosophical and personal essences. All except Pip. He offers the gem,\u00a0“I look,\u00a0you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look,” capturing the truth in that everyone sees what they want to see, believes what they want to believe, and acts accordingly.<\/p>\n Pip, however,\u00a0is not always\u00a0of\u00a0“divinest sense;” just after he offers his profound insight, he squawks like a crow, reinforcement of the fragile, unpredictable\u00a0nature that\u00a0defines madness.\u00a0And it is no coincidence that Pip calls himself a crow, a mean bird: in Ishmael’s\u00a0philosophical break with Ahab in “The Try-Works” when he says “There is a wisdom that is woe;\u00a0but there is a woe that is madness,” conceding that while woe has the potential, through the deepest, darkest plumbings of the soul, to bring forth genius, it may also give way to a dead-end existence of futility, he uses an\u00a0eagle to demonstrate this possibility of attaining genius. Even though crows soar, eagles, on high\u00a0mountains from the star, will always be higher.\u00a0Ahab and Pip both\u00a0may\u00a0be\u00a0mad ultimately, but they do soar occasionally, as evident by Pip’s judgment of\u00a0“The Doubloon” scene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Emily Dickinson’s poem 11, MUCH madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. \u2019T is the majority In this, as all, prevails. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a05 Assent, and you are sane; Demur,\u2014you \u2019re straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain. without the funky font of “UCH,” though more obviously applicable to Ahab, (except, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557","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=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |