Tag Archives: The Castaway

What a trip (literally) – Chapter 93

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This chapter is where I’m starting to get a bit more juice into focusing on the novel again. But also, poor Pip man. He’s really struggling to pull his weight in this chapter, but it also becomes clear that the racial dynamics on the ship are painfully obvious. As a young Black man who has trouble pulling his weight around, it is very easy to be accosted, as is described in the chapter after the first time he jumps off of the boat. We eventually get a scenario in which he jumps off again, and Stubb strands him (not purposefully) thinking the other whale boats would get Pip. That doesn’t end up being the case, and we get this bit of introspection as Ishmael describes Pip’s experience on the open sea.

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of unwarped primal world glided to and fro and before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps…Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.” (453)

This line specifically speaks about how jarring the ocean itself is. It’s this powerhouse of feeling that stirs both the ship and the souls aboard it, but ultimately Pip experiences it first hand in the midst of being stranded. “Multitudinous,” “God-omnipresent,” “Wondrous,” “Strange,” the sea itself is a vast thing that is describe by many words, both good and bad respectively, but Pip has a bit of a revelation here to the world below, one relatively unexplored by humans thanks to the confines of the 1800s. Melville makes a point to compared the ocean itself to something God-like because of this unknowingness. At least at the time, we can’t fully speak it like God’s name, and we can’t fully fathom what lurks below either. Pip’s soul actively drowning shows the draining quality of sea-life aboard the Pequod (and other ships given this perspective), yet the drowning also reveals that both the soul and the ocean itself is infinite. Infinitely unexplored, infinitely untapped, carried to “wondrous depths” that ultimately serve to show that human nature is limited in the eyes of God.

Chapter 93: The Castaway

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I got hooked while reading this chapter because this is one of the most realistic chapters that I have ever seen so far. You might be wondering: “Why is it realistic?” I would say that it is because humans were born with a desire for something that they longed for a period of time, or rather, I would say, we were born with greed in our minds, at least for once in our lifetime. In this case, for Stubb, it’s the riches that he has always been after. There is a passage where they display Stubb’s true desire, where he said: “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump anymore. Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted that though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.” (Melville 452). Why does this matter, you might ask. It matters because at the end of the day, there is something that we are always after, there is something that we keep in our minds at night to remind ourselves why we are pursuing our goals, for what purpose we are pursuing this. When it comes to Stubb, he loves his fellow man, Pip, for sure, but if he were to be given a chance to save Pip or the whale, what would he choose? I think you already know the answer. The whale makes a profit because it is considered to be the creature of the sea; it makes a profit because of the oil that humans want to exploit for their own benefits. Stubb is inherently blinded by riches that Melville considers a ‘money-making animal’ because he has already set his mind on the money, and nothing could change that. Stubb is like an animal with no thoughts when it comes to money; it is the only thing that is keeping him going, and it is the only thing that he desires. Also, when Stubb said, “By the likes of you”, there is a sense of arrogance coming from his side. It is the utter annoyance that Stubb is expressing here, and I wondered if we’ll get to see more of his side later on.