1. Chapter Two: The Carpet-Bag
“But it's too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.”

2. Chapter Three: Spouter's Inn
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.

3. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish
But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half- foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

4. Home sweet home?
A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale's head.
Just in case you haven't caught on yet – the journey's already begun! Even the Inn has become ship-like. And the bar is manned by Jonah, who biblically was a man swallowed by a whale.

5. The mysterious harpooner
I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping with a madman....
"Wall," said the landlord.... be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."

6. What does he look like???
Reasonably or not, Ishmael reacts to the harpooner's appearance with terrified silence.

7. Comic relief...
For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured." ….
"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.

8. Chapter Four: The Counterpane
The laughs continue... tinged with slight discomfort???
First, Ishmael is trapped beneath a sleeping Queequeg's arm
Then, Queequeg dresses himself in an order that defies logic before “proudly march[ing] out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.”

9. Chapter Five: Breakfast
“You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.”
Conclusion:

10. Chapter Six: The Street
“...you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.
… Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.”
Ishmael is still finding things to laugh about; however, here we once again get the suggestion that life at sea is not all laughs and that death is a constant threat, ready and eager to drown the naïve.

11. The streets flow with …. oil.
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

12. “And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses
“And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.”
Everything is transformed by its association with the whale. Ishmael's spirits, the town, women, etc...

13. Chapter Seven: The Chapel
“In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.”
“Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.”

14. “...how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”

15. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

16. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self- containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.

18. What could be more full of meaning
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

19. Chapter Nine: The Sermon
Between chapters 7-9, Ishamael enters two different churches.
Compare the sermons delivered in each of these churches.

20. The sermon preached in the black church is on “the blackness of darkness,” suggesting that evil is impenetrable and cannot be understood by human beings.
Father Mapple’s sermon about Jonah demands that people heed God’s call and proclaim the truth even in the face of great hostility, even when that truth goes against conventional ways of thinking.
While the first sermon exemplifies the belief that the human being’s power of understanding truth is extremely limited, the second suggests that God gives humans the power to apprehend truth, and that men and women should be so confident in their vision of this truth as to defy any opposition.
Throughout Ishmael’s narrative, these two interpretations of human understanding vie with one another for primacy.

21. Chapter Ten: A Bosom Friend
Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Ishmael is ultimately open-minded and befriends the “savage.”

22. Queequeg & Ishmael
He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.

23. Chapter Eleven: The Nightgown
Chapter Ten ends with: “there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”
So what do we make of this? Why entitle Ch. 11 “The Nightgown?”

24. What do we really know about Ishmael?
“Call me Ishmael.”
“...there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”

25. Open-minded or Prejudiced?
And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. (3.54)
Ignorance is the parent of fear.... (3.55)
What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself -- the man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. (3.69)
And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me – that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. (10.9)

26. Are we suppose to know?
The speculations on identity as composed of contrasts vs. identity as a specific essence plays out in the philosophical content of the novel.
In one view, everything is made of contrasting polarities, such as good and evil, light and dark, heat and cold. Nothing exists in itself in the world.
On the other hand, according to Transcendentalist philosophy or religion, the soul has its specific and inviolable unitary essence, which Ishmael knows when he closes his eyes in the dark, thus blotting out contrasts.
Which is the truth, or are both ideas true?

27. Group Questions What’s the point of Chapter Thirteen: The Wheelbarrow?
Find descriptions of the ocean. What message is Melville trying to convey about the ocean? About mankind?
Find examples of foreshadowing. What to they seem to predict?
Why must it be Nantucket Ishmael sails from?
Examine the three captains descriptions. What is being suggested here? What are we left wondering?
Melville uses humor heavily in Chapters Find examples. What type of humor is he using? Why?
Examples of Ishmael’s struggle with fate versus freewill?
References to historical, mythological, biblical events/texts/figures. (Or to things you are not certain of.)

28. Chapter Thirteen: The Wheelbarrow
Once again, Ishmael seems driven to make Queequeg as relatable as possible. Thus, the story of Queequeg's ignorance about the purpose of a wheelbarrow is paired with a tale about a sea Captain who mistakes a punchbowl for a finger-glass. Interestingly, Queequeg tales both tales. So clearly, he is not ashamed of his former ignorance and is humble enough not to mind sharing the tale of his embarrassment with a close friend.

29. “...betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
Ishmael is still pre-occupied with his quest to decide between fate and freewill. Here, man has no power to affect the world.

30. How I snuffed that Tartar air. —how I spurned that turnpike earth
How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.
The sea is great, mysterious, and eternal. Furthermore, it remains untouched, altered, or affected by man's presence. Again, with man's powerlessness.

31. A “boom”

32. Foreshadowing
All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.

33. Chapter Fourteen: Nantucket
“...two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it.”

34. … The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.”

35. Chapter Fifteen: Chowder
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top- mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

36. Tophet

37. Chapter Sixteen: The Ship
A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.
"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!"
"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."

38. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.
Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.

39. The Two Captains
he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad- brimmed hat.

40. Melville: The Jokester
First Ishmael mentions how both Captains are Quakers, but then goes on to explain they are “fighting Quakers” as they have slaughtered 100s of whales. Quakers were pacifists and conscientious objectors to war and violence.
Bildad offers Ishmael the 777th lay. This is a biblical number and Bildad is reading Matthew 6:19 which advises people not to lay up treasure on the earth.

41. Ahab
Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody— desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name.

42. Chapter Seventeen: The Ramadan
"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"
In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

43. Chapter Eighteen: His Mark
"I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we all join hands.” ..."Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon.'”
"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."
"The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,"

44. Chapter Nineteen: The Prophet
Elijah is a biblical prophet. According to the Books of Kings, Elijah defended the worship of Yahweh over that of the Phoenician god Baal (an idol); he raised the dead, brought fire down from the sky, and was taken up in a whirlwind (either accompanied by a chariot and horses of flame or riding in it). In the Book or Malachi, Elijah's return is prophesied "before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord.“ Elijah and Ahab have history. Ahab had been killing the Lord’s prophets when Elijah arrives in his kingdom. Ahab confronts Elijah upon his arrival, referring to him as the "troubler of Israel." Elijah responds by throwing the charge back at Ahab, saying that it is Ahab who has troubled Israel by allowing the worship of false gods. Elijah wins the battle of the gods that they devise. Ahab gets into further trouble when he follows his wife’s suggestions and kills off those who trouble him. Including the owners of land he covets. Elijah predicts his demise: “dogs will lick his blood.”

45. Ahab
“…about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn,  long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy.”  
Given the names, it’s pretty clear that Ahab killed a man before an altar in Catholic country. He was in a church or a chapel, holy ground in any case. It is here, apparently, that he spits into a silver calabash. A calabash is a type of gourd, one that looks like a bowl. In fact, calabashes are sometimes dried and made into bowls. So Ahab spits into a bowl while before an altar in a Catholic holy setting. Could this silver calabash have held the Eucharist?
Also possible: the calabash to be an allusion to the Book of Jonah. The sermon describes and embellishes every part of the book save the last chapter. In that chapter Jonah starves himself outside of Nineveh in the hot sun, God creates a gourd (or calabash) to provide Jonah shade. God than smites the Gourd in a display of his power and it is implied that Jonah and God reconcile.

46. Foreshadowing
This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half- revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things. I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.

47. Chapter Twenty One: Going Abroad
—"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that ship a while ago?" Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure." …, "See if you can find 'em now, will ye? "Find who?" "Morning to ye! morning to ye! …Oh! I was going to warn ye against—but never mind, …Good-bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand Jury."

48. Chapter Twenty-Two: Merry Christmas
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

49. Chapter Twenty-Three: The Lee Shore
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm- tossed ship, that miserably drives along the  leeward land.  
Leeward is the direction downwind from the point of reference. The side of a ship that is towards the leeward is its lee side. If the vessel is heeling under the pressure of the wind, this will be the "lower side".

50. “Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the  intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous,  slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean- perishing—straight up, leaps thy  apotheosis!”   
Note: Apotheosis is the glorification of a subject to divine level.

51. Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ahab
Elijah: …for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of.

52. Ahab
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.

53. Ahab
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe…

54. Chapter Thirty-One: Queen Mab
…well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you know how curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult…

55. Stubb’s dream
… 'wise Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour; I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him; account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb.

56. Chapter Thirty-Six: The Quarter Deck
Note the sudden shift in writing style
Describe Ahab and his effect on the other sailors

57. Ahab
…you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement. "D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out." (153)

58. More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions. (154)

59. Moby Dick
"Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white- headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke- look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!" (155)

60. Starbuck
"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

61. Vengence against?
If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines.

62. (Aside) “Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

63. Ceremony
"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts- long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye…. Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch the axis….

64. “Commend the murderous chalices
“Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league…. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered.

65. Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sunset
Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night-good night!

66. 'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad- Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened!

67. … come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me
… 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 fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

68. Chapter Thirty-Eight: Dusk
My soul is more than matched; she's over-manned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him, he cries;- aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!

69. Chapter Thirty-Nine: First Night Watch
Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left- that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated. …the old Mogul has fixed him, too. Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

70. Chapter 40: Midnight, Forecastle
A storm!
Multicultural group of sailors  prejudice  knife fight
Bad weather
A cloud like Ahab’s scar
Lashing down the deck to sail straight through
Gods and men at war

71. Chapter 41: Moby Dick
Ishmael recognizes that sailors are prone to exaggeration and says tails of M.D. have already moved into the realm of legend and supernatural; however, he also believes that at the core these legends are based on a truth that M.D. is extraordinary and unusual (both in appearance and nature)

73. The Sperm Whale
“…to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. … that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are ‘struck with the most lively terrors,’ and ‘often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death’” (174).

74. Moby Dick
“…declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time)…” (175).
“…a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump” (176).
“Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults…. seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent” (176).

75. Ahab on the White Whale
“Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it” (177).

76. Mad? …but…
“…even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument” (178). “Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate” (179).

77. Possessed
“How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his…” (180).

78. Chapter Forty-Two: The Whiteness of the Whale
“…there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me” (181).

79. Whiteness
Ishmael acknowledges all the good and holy associations of the color but says even at its ‘best’ within the color “there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood” (182).

80. Whiteness con…
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all- color of atheism from which we shrink?

81. “…the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this,
the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

82. Chapter Forty-Three
"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?.... There it is again- under the hatches- don't you hear it- a cough- it sounded like a cough." "Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket." "There again- there it is!- it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over, now!.... Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too” ( ).

83. Chapter: 47 The Mat-Maker
“I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance- aye, chance, free will, and necessity- wise incompatible- all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events” (207).

84. “There she blows!”
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming. "There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!" "Where-away?" "On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!" Instantly all was commotion. The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus. (208)

85. Ch. 48: The First Lowering
Describe how each mate encourages his crew differently.
What distinguishes Ahab’s crew?

86. Signing up yet?
“Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's host encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;- neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale” (217).

87. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard- bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.

88. Chapter 50: Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah
"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask. "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know." "I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel." ( )

89. Chapter 77: The Great Heidelburgh Tun
The Heidelberg Tun is an extremely large wine vat contained within the cellars of Heidelberg Castle. In 1751, the year of its construction, the present one had a capacity of 221,726 litres (58, U.S. gallons). Due to the drying of the wood its current capacity is 219,000 litres (57, U.S. gallons). One hundred and thirty oak trees were reputedly used in its construction. It has only rarely been used as a wine barrel, and in fact presently enjoys more use as a tourist attraction, and also as a dance floor since one was constructed on top of the tun.

90. Chapter 87: The Grand Armanda (or perhaps: The Chase of Whales and Pirates)
“Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men” (372). “Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion” (374).

91. “Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. …. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy” (376).

92. Queequeg’s hat
This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by. Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement… (378).

93. Chapter 93: The Castaway (Pip)
“ ‘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 any more.’ Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence. But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk” (400).

94. Power of the Sea
“Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” (401).

95. “By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had leeringly 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 the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God” ( ).

96. Chapter 110: Queequeg in His Coffin
“But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity” (460).

97. “With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg- ‘Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!’ (464)."

98. Chapter Ninety-Four: A Squeeze of the Hand
“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (403).

99. Chapter Ninety-Five: The Cassock
“Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office” (406).

100. Chapter Ninety-Six: The Try-Works
“By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations” (408).

101. “…the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul” (409).

102. “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly” (410).

103. Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar” (411).

104. Chapter Fifty-Three The Gam
What is a gam?
What typically happens on a gam?
(Be sure to note how the gams in the subsequent chapters are unique.)

105. Chapter 52: The Albatross
Note the odd behavior of the fish & Ahab’s reaction.
Ishmael’s final thoughts:
“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed” (230).

106. Ch. 71,81,91, &100
CH. 71 Jeroboam’s Story ~ the plague, Gabriel, and the letter CH. 81 The Pequod Meets the Virgin ~ a empty ship, “the life,” & a sinking whale CH. 91 The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud ~ irony of the name, blasted whale, & ambergris CH. 100 Samuel Enderby (London) ~ club hammer & magnet

107. CH. 115,128, &131
CH. 115 The Pequod Meets the Bachelor ~ fullship & Nantucket sand CH. 128 The Pequod Meets the Rachel ~ a business offer & a missing boy CH. 131 The Pequod meets the Delight ~ Irony of name, & a baptism

108. CH. 106: Ahab’s leg
“For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings- out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods” (448).

109. CH. 107 The Carpenter
“For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half- horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness” (451). “And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake” (452).

110. CH. 108 Ahab and the Carpenter
“Well, manmaker! … No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What's Prometheus about there?- the blacksmith, I mean- what's he about?” (453).

111. “What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all three places standing in one hell- how was that? Oh! I don't wonder he looked so scornful at me! I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep water with tall, heron-built captains” (456).

112. Ch. 109 Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin
“Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: ‘There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.- On deck!’" (458). “’… let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man’" (458).

113. Ch.117 The Whale Watch
"I have dreamed it again," said he. "Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?...But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America." ….. "And what was that saying about thyself?" "Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot." “…I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it." "Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fire-flies in the gloom- "Hemp only can kill thee." "The gallows, ye mean.- I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;- "Immortal on land and on sea!"

114. CH. 118 The Quadrant
"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down,down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life ofthine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!" "Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"

115. Ch. 119
Significance of three’s
Fire symbolism
Ahab’s defiance (486)

116. Chapter 123: The Musket & Chapter 124: The Needle
Starbuck’s dilemma
Inversion of needles
“In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride” (498).

117. Chapter 125: The Log and Line & Chapter 126: The Life-Buoy
Why are Pip and Ahab suddenly so close? What similarities do they share? What differences?
What is the life-bouy made of?
Who is it used for? With what result? Significance?

118. Chapter 130: The Hat
“So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision- one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat; it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands” (516).

119. “An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea” (516).

120. Chapter 132: The Symphony Opening passages  duality of nature
“From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop” (519).
"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!...” (521).

121. “But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. ‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike….’ But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away” ( ).

122. Chapter 133: The Chase— First Day
“…he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch” (522). Ahab’s senses are beyond the ordinary sailors

123. “There she blows! …It is Moby Dick!”
Ahab’s doubloon
Moby Dick’s destruction
Ahab falls into the sea
No harpoons or men lost (yet)
Ahab’s obsessive pacing
“Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold- I shiver!” (530).

124. Chapter 134: The Chase –Second Day
“The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls…. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race. They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things- oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp- yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to” ( ).

125. What imagery!
“That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch” (536).

126. More broken boats and limbs but Ahab is unfazed…
"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!- d'ye see it.- But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?- Aloft there! which way?" (537).

127. The Parsee (Fedallah) disappears. “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man
The Parsee (Fedallah) disappears. “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders” (539).

128. Chapter 135: The Chase –Third Day
“Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm- frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it” (540).

129. The Wind
“Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing- a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in the wind” (541).

130. Ahab’s Goodbyes ( )
"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck." "Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so." "Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!" "Truth, sir: saddest truth." "Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;- and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;- shake hands with me, man." Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue. "Oh, my captain, my captain!- noble heart- go not- go not!- see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!" "Lower away!"-cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by for the crew!"

131. Starbuck’s Goodbye
“Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,- fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl; thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between- Is my journey's end coming?” (544).

132. The Parsee Returns
“Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab. The harpoon dropped from his hand” (545).

133. Moby Dick, Sharks, Hearses, and Hemp
"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,- death- glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!" The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. (550)

134. The Pequod’s End
“…this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (551).

135. Epilogue
“…the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan” (552).