But good bye, good bye, old mast-head!”īy the end of the soliloquy Ahab is again convinced - or maybe not wholly convinced, but nevertheless affirming - of his impending victory. He addresses the vast ocean, “the same to Noah as to me.” He seems to portend his own demise, and is distracted momentarily by the “lovely leewardings” that “must lead somewhere-to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms.” But he won’t escape: “Leeward! the white whale goes that way look to windward, then the better if the bitterer quarter.
In a potent soliloquy, Ahab’s sentimentality takes over. How does Ishmael bear witness to these voices? Starbuck’s inner monologue turmoils, “I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!” Ahab swears to meet Moby Dick, “Forehead to forehead…this third time” we enter the final private thoughts of Stubb and Flask (but never the pagan harpooneers). The fool there is of course a bit of self-talk Ahab directs to his self-same self. Ahab glimpses his folly: “I’ve oversailed him,” he mutters about Moby Dick, continuing, “How, got the start? Aye, he’s chasing me now not I, him-that’s bad I might have known it, too. 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. 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. The wind is a kind of fate, an invisible entity that both propels and repels objects of the phenomenal world: The wind is an apparently concrete force that operates with abstract agency.
After calling for news of the White Whale, Ahab riffs to himself on the wind. The beginning of the end begins, “The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh” - we are in the tranquil pacified Pacific, beautiful blue, the calm site of a coming calamity. In this riff, Chapter 135, “The Chase-Third Day” and the Epilogue of Moby-Dick.
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