![]() Moby-Dick, Chaper X LI This is a remarkable passage, an achievement of rhetoric and rhythm, of sound and sense, that would repay the most exhaustive stylistic analysis. 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. 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. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning. 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. Sewall Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, 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. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Īhab’s Quenchless Feud: The Tragic Vision in Shakespeare and Melville1 Richard B. ![]()
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