Category Archives: Week 12: Chapters 109-132

Chapter 112 – The Blacksmith

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During our readings, I am always careful to take careful consideration for a chapter dedicated to any one specific character. Since the blacksmith has hardly ever been mentioned, or only been introduced as a means of dialogue between him and another more important character, I decided to do a bit more research on the language and references made to him. Towards the end of the chapter reads the lines “But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robber them of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family’s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror” (pg. 528). What an odd name to give a burglar…

After a bit of research, I realized that the “Bottle” aspect of the burglar’s name was what held the most importance. It wasn’t a man that had come in and robbed the family of everything they owned and loved, it was alcoholism. The blacksmith had fallen into drinking and thus lost his possessions, his home, and then his family. Alcoholism has always been known, across various fields, for destroying not just the individuals addicted to alcohol, but the people around them. My research further brought about information of a magician, around 1749 in London, England, who proposed the trick that he could fit within a glass bottle, failed to do so, and in turn the audience burned down the event and tent he was performing in. This can be used as a means of representing how quickly the blacksmith’s alcoholism burned down everything he loved, and his ties to his loved ones, leading him to “the guilt of intermediate death (suicide)” (529) and thus resulting in his being on the Pequod in current time of the novel. Ishmael had stated during the beginning chapters of the novel that men who contemplated suicide often sought out ships and whaling as a better means of self-destruction. After burning ties to everything he cared about, instead of committing suicide, the blacksmith turned to a whaling voyage, one that prolongs his death, but leads to it nonetheless.

White, the color of absence and death, in flame

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Throughout Moby-Dick, there has been a kind of attention to the number 3. There are 3 mates for the ships, 3 mast heads to the ship, and the 3 peaks featured on the doubloon, but there are also supernatural connections to 3 sprinkled through out the novel, such as the blood of 3 harpooners to temper Ahab’s barb, the 3 fires alight the top of the mast heads, as well as 3 people prophesizing Ahab’s demise: the prophet, Gabriel from the Jeroboam, and the Parsee.

This is a number present in the Bible – the holy trinity – and even Pythagoras, a great philosopher of Greek History that has been mentioned at least once in the novel, believed that the number three was special. One such reason was that it is the only number where the numbers that come before it add perfectly to it. Another reason, and one that I link more to this section of the novel than his other reasons, was that it seems to reflect our world on a conceptual level – beginning, middle, end; birth, life, death.

In the chapter, The Candles, this number is repeated and emphasized as the spectral lights cast brilliant shadows onto the ship below.

“All the yard arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightening-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” (549)

This all comes two chapters out from Parsee’s prediction of Ahab’s death by hemp rope, after Ahab calls it a strange sight the idea of a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean. For reference, hearse plumes were ostrich feathers that would adorn hearse carriages at the time, signaling the departed’s wealth and status. Having 5-6 plumes meant you were wealthy, more meant that you were truly rich. In reference to this, the flames are described as pallid and tapering. What are the flames but Ahab’s own funeral plumes, floating atop the ocean he so desperately searches for his monomaniacal need for revenge?

Chapter 110: Queeqeg Returned From the Grave!

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As I was closing out reading chapter 110, I started to become concerned for Queeqeg and his health as he started to become very ill as he had requested for a coffin to be made for him so that he could be laied to rest at sea. As Queeqeg was not looking well at the beginning of the chapter but towards the end, we see that Queeqeg now wants to push through the sickness as he doesn’t want it to overtake him just yet. This highlights that internal strength which Queeqeg has over the course of nature which came over him. It shows Queeqeg’s beliefs as well that he will overcome what is happening to him.

“They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will, and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a world it was Queequeg’s conceit that if man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.” This shows that Queeqeg had dedicated his life to being on this boat now and that he would not be overcomed by nature yet, he wanted it to live his life as long as he could.

From Ishmael’s and the sailors perspectie, they had even questioned Queeqeg and how he had made this decision as he even prayed to his God, Yojo, for guidance as he was ill aboard the Peqod. He seemed so confident in his decision and he micraculously became better after that! He didn’t want a plain sickness to take him away from this world. He then proceeds to list what I am imagining he would prefer to take his life away like the whale, or a very harsh breeze that could blow him over board. Queeqeg appeared to want to go out some way that was not natural. He wanted something that was placed upon him like those things.

Yes he did get better but he still overcame what was put upon him. He overcame the sickness as he was wanting to push through to his very end as he knew that was not his true end of how he would live out his life, not by sickness.

Chapter One-Hundred Twelve

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In Chapter 112, “The Blacksmith”, Melville’s language in this chapter fuses death, transcendence, and the sea into one symbolic symbol. He states, “Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them…” (Melville 529) This passage encapsulates one of Moby-Dicks central paradoxes, that the ocean is a spiritual frontier and also a death drive. To go to the sea is to flirt with the unknown, the sea is an entity that lies beyond the limits of human life. Melville uses this chapter as an allegory to capitalism. The sailor’s attraction to the sea mirrors humans’ attraction to metaphysical danger, the wish to lose oneself in something vast, to escape the confinements of individuality. 

Melville starts the beginning of this sentence with bluntness, using the tone of fatalism to reflect the alienation and hardships of a sailor’s life. A “carrier like this” seems to exhaust every human possibility, leaving death as the only remaining sequel, a continuation rather than an end. The middle of the sentence is particularly interesting since it describes the psychological tension between despair and desire; these “death-longing” men are drawn toward annihilating but restrained by “interior compunctions against suicide.” The sea becomes a space that offers the feeling of self-dissolution without the moral finality of suicide. Melville gives a way for sailors to escape from the world without committing the act. The sea absorbs and erases distinctions between man and nature or even purpose and aimlessness. The self loses solidity at sea, it becomes as fluid and unbounded as the waves themselves. The sea grants sailors a simulated death, a temporary relief that satisfies a spiritual craving for release while sparing the soul from the definite consequences of suicide.