{"id":862,"date":"2010-02-21T23:42:59","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T03:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=862"},"modified":"2010-02-21T23:42:59","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T03:42:59","slug":"ahabs-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=862","title":{"rendered":"Ahab’s Purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye, come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my purpose is fixed with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.\u00a0 Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents bed’s unerringly I rush!\u00a0 Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For me, this passage really drove home just how serious and driven Ahab is on his quest for Moby Dick.\u00a0 He describes this purpose as having a path that is already fixed with iron rails- he is saying that this is already what he had decided on and his mind cannot be changed.\u00a0 Also, he says that his soul is running on this path- this tells us how determined and deeply devoted Ahab is to killing the white whale.\u00a0 Ahab also makes it clear during this soliloquy that none of the men on the ship are going to be able to change his mind about this, he is letting it be known that he is the captain of this ship and his word goes.\u00a0\u00a0 During the last part of this passage, Ahab also lets us in on the how far he is willing to go and what he is willing to risk and go through in order to achieve his goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye, come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my purpose is fixed with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.\u00a0 Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, […]<\/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-862","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\/862","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=862"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":865,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions\/865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}