herman melville

[wease]

Hello, would someone like to help me understand Chapter 106, Ahab's Leg? Am I to understand that

Spoiler: show

Moby Dick ate Ahab's leg on a previous voyage, but Ahab wasn't too distraught over it. He was planning to captain the Pequod like normal and catch some other whales. But then shortly before the launch of the Pequod, he fell down and his peg-leg slipped and ripped his cock off? So now he's super mad at the whale and decides he's going to hunt him and kill him?

Wonderful if true

Why are you thinking he lost his cock?

[The Argonaut]

Just before Chapter 106 are a bunch of chapters about how big whale bones are. Ugh. But just before that Ahab and crew came across another whale boat captain who had, interestingly enough, also lost a limb to the white whale. This captain was down one arm, but his reaction was not to "monomaniacally" chase Moby Dick to the ends of the earth. His reaction is to, far more reasonably, avoid the beast. "Ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm?", he says.

This makes Ahab look even more insane in comparison. Chapter 106 is two-part. The part that takes place in the present is basically saying that when Ahab jumped off that other captain's boat back onto the Pequod he cracked his peg-leg and will need to make another.

Which calls to mind for Ishmael another story. When we first board the Pequod, Ahab is hiding belowdecks out of seen for days, and Ishmael finally tells us why.

"For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured."

He is "found one night" on the ground. This is a humiliating position. He's incapable of helping himself. And then Melville writes around the exact nature of the injury, but the displaced ivory limb does something to Ahab's groin that results in an agonizing wound.

It ripped his cock off!

Or at least rendered him in some way impotent.

"Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of former woe;"

Ahab immediately draws the line between the ivory limb ripping his cock off with the fact that the only reason he had the ivory peg-leg in the first place was because of that damn white whale.

Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.
...
That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty- remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab- invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.

Melville is writing around it again. This is a big mystery, a closely guarded secret. It's more consequential than just a healthy gash on the thigh. He calls it "the above hinted casualty." The wound is worse than Melville is committing to exact words.

So, before the slip that took the cock off, Ahab was probably like that other limbless captain. Bummed about the leg but not monomaniacally obsessed with taking vengeance on the while whale. Hence why the owners of the Pequod trusted him to take their ship to hunt regular whales and make them all some money. They didn't know about the cock, he was keeping the secret. But it's harder to forgive a whale for taking your cock than it is to forgive him for taking your leg. "Ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm?" What should Ahab do without his cock? He doesn't have another.

The whale must pay

[wease]

“All but pierced his groin.”

His dick remains. His missing leg represents him feeling that his manhood is lost.

[The Argonaut]

That man's cock was ripped clean off

[Simple Torture]

How does Chapter 95 play into your theory?

[The Argonaut]

wow, it really is all dicks. Moby-Dick! I get it now!

[BurtReynolds]

It's all cumming together now.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

I'm very much behind, but just knocked out around 10 chapters yesterday. Chapter 60 has what has easily been my favorite line so far. I'm going to use the spoiler code so as not to give away anything to those who haven't read:

Spoiler: show

From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp- the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.

[The Argonaut]

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Is it okay if I barely pay attention to the non-narrative chapters?

[The Argonaut]

I finished the book today

[wease]

Was the ending full of erect, severed penises?

[Simple Torture]

Was the ending full of erect, severed penises?

Some wood pops up in the epilogue.

[The Argonaut]

When this book is good, it's very very good. When this book is bad, it's very very long

[Simple Torture]

The last time I read it, which was the first time I ever read it for pleasure and not academics, I found myself laughing a lot more. My favorite joke is very early:

Spoiler: show

When Ishmael thinks Queequag has killed himself and he tells the innkeeper, and she says she’s ordering a sign that reads “no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor.”

[BurtReynolds]

The stuff at the inn is the best part of the book imo.

[The Argonaut]

The stuff at the inn is the best part of the book imo.

I very much agree

[lennytheweedwhacker]

Finally hit triple digit chapters. I hope to be done by the end of the weekend. What a ride!