Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

The Second Abandonment

Pip jumped again under very similar circumstances to the first time. This time he did not breast out the line, so when the whale started to run, he was left behind on the sea like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Stubb was but too true to his word. No boat-knife was lifted as Pip fell rapidly astern; Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him while the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of ocean lay between Pip and Stubb.

Solitude at Sea

Pip now found himself a lonely castaway in the loveliest and loftiest of loneliness. The narrative reflects on how, in calm weather, swimming in the open ocean is easy for the practiced swimmer, yet the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity cannot be told. Sailors in a dead calm who bathe in the open sea hug their ship closely, coasting along her sides.

The Castaway’s Ordeal

Stubb had not truly intended to abandon Pip, expecting the two boats behind him would come up quickly to pick him up. However, those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spied whales and turned to give chase. Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and his crew so intent upon their fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. Bobbing up and down in the sea, Pip’s ebony head showed like a head of cloves against the flat, spangled expanse stretching away to the horizon.

Rescue and Madness

By the merest chance, the ship itself at last rescued him. But from that hour, the little negro went about the deck an idiot. The sea had kept his finite body up but drowned the infinite of his soul. Yet he was not entirely drowned—rather, he was carried down alive to wondrous depths where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided before his passive eyes. Wisdom revealed its hoarded heaps, and among the joyous, heartless eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent coral insects that heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom and spoke it, and his shipmates called him mad. Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense, and wandering from all mortal reason, man arrives at celestial thoughts that to reason seem absurd and frantic.