Ahab/Stillstorm
Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 4:49 am
As promised I’ve scrabbled up a little Ahab/Stillstorm comparison for your reading pleasure. I author this short essay whilst keeping in mind a number of matters: that this is by no means exhaustive, and if I may throw the first stone quite an amateurish attempt, that the first chapter has only recently concluded and with the knowledge that not everyone is familiar with the Pequod’s deranged and ivory legged captain. So ho! Spoilers below!
Being now forewarned I hasten to introduce to ye all the infamous Ahab: A wiry elder with muscles like the actual cord utilized in the hoisting of his sails and furred with gray tufts about the cheeks and scalp and fitted with a prosthetic of ivory bone, a pilfered rib from one of his abyssal dwelling quarries, much American, known as a Quaker, and possessed with the monomaniac desire to hunt down the pale leviathan to whom he forfeited a lower limb, a creature known by harpooners of every nation as the dreaded Moby Dick.
Now it should be told that the Pequod was a Nantucket ship and her captain a tawny Nantucket whaler and it is here I should like to begin my comparison. For Nantucket is a frosty island off the coast of Massachusetts and it could not be said to be unlike the rimy continent of Beleri whose tempestuous seas sired our fabled Stillstorm (whose yellow eyes and pallid complexion and nose of Cyranoic [see pg. 78] proportions betrays her origins). Among both there stands a lengthy tradition of sailing and whaling which has undoubtedly engendered among the people the varied temperaments and hardness of hearts that accompany such sanguineous professions.
In fact one might well conclude it would have been better for all parties involved had it been our lady pallid met with the ivory masted man (so alike in physicality) instead of the one armed Captain Boomer. For each could well be seen with these words on their lips,
“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other.”
And though we have seen little of Stillstorm have we not seen enough? Her very name evokes the hurricane, that ultimate tempest, she the eye and the storm raging all around her and is it not so the son of Omri likewise had a storm brooding in his kingly being? True she bows to Tempo, though never to a Stubb, but it was so that in more antiquated days it was the Specksynder who at times required ultimate deferment and the captain restricted to the “navigation and general management of the vessel.” In an honest push to shove ‘twould be no far stretch to believe Stillstorm would make any mutineer walk the plank into the oceanic void.
Of course the overlap does not end there. As the author has stated, though we are not in possession of all the details, Stillstorm has endured a fantastic amount of trauma to body and mind with consequences reminiscent of Ahab’s own encounter that left his mizzen demasted. To wit, and as has been said before Ahab, upon being reaped of his leg, had it replaced with an ivory tusk of bone harvested out from the blubbery breast of his eternal game. Tis the color I call attention to for the paleness of his bone is much like the paleness of her skin which we our led to believe was replaced in some grand surgery following her mauling (if you can call it that).
Neither do these fleshy wounded tabernacles betray any sign of weakness. For it was in spite of that ivory leg which lent Ahab his aura of invincibility and perhaps it is also so that the same is true for the reconstituted Stillstorm. In either case each has come to the point in their lives where they would call no sandy shore home. Stillstorm has served a full twenty-five years on the frontline (an exile, perhaps by now a self-imposed one) and Ahab after returning to Nantucket quickly departed after a brief stay for to resupply his ship with gear and men.
And that’s that. Hopefully as the story progresses I’ll be able to wring a few things more out.
Being now forewarned I hasten to introduce to ye all the infamous Ahab: A wiry elder with muscles like the actual cord utilized in the hoisting of his sails and furred with gray tufts about the cheeks and scalp and fitted with a prosthetic of ivory bone, a pilfered rib from one of his abyssal dwelling quarries, much American, known as a Quaker, and possessed with the monomaniac desire to hunt down the pale leviathan to whom he forfeited a lower limb, a creature known by harpooners of every nation as the dreaded Moby Dick.
Now it should be told that the Pequod was a Nantucket ship and her captain a tawny Nantucket whaler and it is here I should like to begin my comparison. For Nantucket is a frosty island off the coast of Massachusetts and it could not be said to be unlike the rimy continent of Beleri whose tempestuous seas sired our fabled Stillstorm (whose yellow eyes and pallid complexion and nose of Cyranoic [see pg. 78] proportions betrays her origins). Among both there stands a lengthy tradition of sailing and whaling which has undoubtedly engendered among the people the varied temperaments and hardness of hearts that accompany such sanguineous professions.
In fact one might well conclude it would have been better for all parties involved had it been our lady pallid met with the ivory masted man (so alike in physicality) instead of the one armed Captain Boomer. For each could well be seen with these words on their lips,
“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other.”
And though we have seen little of Stillstorm have we not seen enough? Her very name evokes the hurricane, that ultimate tempest, she the eye and the storm raging all around her and is it not so the son of Omri likewise had a storm brooding in his kingly being? True she bows to Tempo, though never to a Stubb, but it was so that in more antiquated days it was the Specksynder who at times required ultimate deferment and the captain restricted to the “navigation and general management of the vessel.” In an honest push to shove ‘twould be no far stretch to believe Stillstorm would make any mutineer walk the plank into the oceanic void.
Of course the overlap does not end there. As the author has stated, though we are not in possession of all the details, Stillstorm has endured a fantastic amount of trauma to body and mind with consequences reminiscent of Ahab’s own encounter that left his mizzen demasted. To wit, and as has been said before Ahab, upon being reaped of his leg, had it replaced with an ivory tusk of bone harvested out from the blubbery breast of his eternal game. Tis the color I call attention to for the paleness of his bone is much like the paleness of her skin which we our led to believe was replaced in some grand surgery following her mauling (if you can call it that).
Neither do these fleshy wounded tabernacles betray any sign of weakness. For it was in spite of that ivory leg which lent Ahab his aura of invincibility and perhaps it is also so that the same is true for the reconstituted Stillstorm. In either case each has come to the point in their lives where they would call no sandy shore home. Stillstorm has served a full twenty-five years on the frontline (an exile, perhaps by now a self-imposed one) and Ahab after returning to Nantucket quickly departed after a brief stay for to resupply his ship with gear and men.
And that’s that. Hopefully as the story progresses I’ll be able to wring a few things more out.