Impersonal Attitude
The carpenter maintains an impersonal attitude toward his work and subjects. He regards teeth as bits of ivory, heads as mere top-blocks, and men themselves as capstans. This detachment makes him equally indifferent and unsentimental across all situations and persons.
The Stolid Worker
The carpenter exhibits remarkable impersonal stolidity, resembling the general silence of the visible world. While eternally active in countless modes, the world holds its peace and ignores all. This stolidity involves an all-ramifying heartlessness, though punctuated at times by old crutch-like humor and grizzled wittiness.
Uncompromised Simplicity
His uncompromised simplicity emerges from a life of wandering that rubbed away all outward clingings. He becomes a stripped abstract, an unfractioned integral, uncompromised as a newborn, living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
The Living Tool
The carpenter functions as a living tool, compared to a Sheffield pocket knife containing blades, screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, and nail-filers. His brain, if it existed, must have early oozed into his finger muscles, making him a pure manipulator responding to whatever function his superiors require.
The Solipsizing Sentinel
Despite his tool-like nature, the carpenter contains an unaccountable life-principle that anomalously does its duty. This cunning essence keeps him soliloquizing much of the time, like an unreasoning wheel humming to itself. His body serves as a sentry-box where this internal watchman talks continuously to maintain vigilance and ward off stagnation.
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
The scene opens with the Carpenter at his vice-bench during the First Night Watch, laboring to shape an ivory joist into a replacement leg while sneezing from the bone dust that irritates him. When Ahab arrives for a fitting, he engages the Carpenter in a philosophical exchange about phantom limb sensations and his longing to be free from dependency on the craftsman’s work, reflecting bitterly on how a proud man must nevertheless depend upon an ordinary workman for the means to stand. The conversation takes an absurd turn when Ahab orders an imaginary complete man constructed to perfect specifications, prompting the bewildered Carpenter to question whether he is being spoken to at all. After Ahab departs with his mysterious pronouncements, the Carpenter resumes his filing while reflecting on the captain’s strangeness, acknowledging that Stubb’s assessment of Ahab as “queer” captures something essential about the man’s peculiar nature and hard-driven demeanor.
Deck First Night Watch
The scene opens during the First Night Watch on the deck, where the Carpenter is busily filing an ivory joist for Captain Ahab’s replacement leg. His workbench is cluttered with slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools. The glow of the blacksmith’s forge is visible forward, where Smut works on the buckle-screw for the leg.
Carpenter Files Ivory Leg
The Carpenter struggles with the filing work, cursing the file and the bone alternately. He sneezes repeatedly from the ivory dust, musing that working with dead lumber produces irritating dust while live trees and bones do not. He is relieved there is no knee-joint to construct, as that would be more challenging. He intends to create an exceptional leg and wishes he had more time to give it a proper finish. He decides to call the Captain to verify the length before cutting.
Ahab Visits the Carpenter
Captain Ahab arrives at the bench, and the Carpenter greets him with “Well, manmaker!” He informs Ahab he is ready to mark the length of the new leg. Ahab is unfazed at being measured for a leg, remarking it is not his first time. He examines the carpenter’s vice and praises its grip, expressing his preference for things that can “hold” in “this slippery world.”
Measuring the Replacement Leg
Ahab submits to having his finger placed on the measurement point while the Carpenter marks the leg length. Ahab comments approvingly on the vice’s grip, then asks about the blacksmith’s work on the buckle-screw, noting the fierce red flame of the forge.
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