[Roger Slater]

I remember it the way Bazza does. "I alone am escaped to tell thee" says Ishmael. Ahab is a goner. I thought "stricken" meant only that he had suffered a blow. While the ending says that Ahab went down with the ship, there is no clear declaration that Moby Dick met his end.

[John Whitworth]

I don't remember it at all. I never got to the end. 'Stricken' ought to be definitive, but Yahoo says the whale doesn't die. Bloody Melville doesn't know how to use the English Language. I've altered it in line with Melville's ending.

[Marion Shore]

They harpoon the whale, fatally wounding him, meanwhile Ahab gets caught in the line connected to the harpoon and goes down with the whale.

[basil ransome-davies]

'Stricken' is an archaic past participle of the verb 'strike' (now we would say 'struck'). You can be grief-stricken or conscience-stricken (or harpooned, or shot, or knifed etc.) without dying. I have just been stricken with arthritis yet I live to tell the tale. But I'm pretty amazed that John could fail to finish a book with the volcanic energy & audacious scope of Moby Dick, a defining work of the American Renaissance.

[Roger Slater]

Melville did okay with the English language, actually.

I'm not sure the whale was fatally wounded, Marion. He had sustained many wounds in the past, including wounds inflicted by Ahab, but managed to survive. I would think that his symbolic function throughout the book demands that he be eternal, his whiteness sort of like the white radiance of eternity, the Ur-Whale, whatever. Personally, I would find it far less satisfying to think that Ahab actually accomplished his objective of slaying Moby, even if he had to pay with his life (a price I am sure he would have been more than willing to pay). Melville's ending didn't have any real happy side to it, except to the extent you may have been rooting for Moby (which, come to think of it, I was).

At least that's how I've always thought of it. But I've only read the book, not studied it with eggheads to tell me what I've missed.

[basil ransome-davies]

I'm with you there, Roger. However you look at it – and library bookshelves groan with the works of Melville exegetes – the whale (with its inscrutable 'whiteness') is the transcendent element in the novel. It's humanity that's mortal.

But on the here-and-now, pragmatic level of the competition John has fixed things up. Could be a winner.

[Marion Shore]

Yes, Bob, I guess I just assumed the whale was mortally wounded when Ahab was dragged down with him, but Melville never says that. You're right, Moby had harpoons in him from past encounters, so he certainly could have survived this attack. He's probably still swimming around nowadays.

[Roger Slater]

Yup, and the whale at Sea World who did an Ahab on that poor trainer last week is peforming once again (with only three deaths to his credit so far).

John, good entry by the way.

[John Whitworth]

Bazza, but it's so flaming long. Or maybe it just seems that way. I finished Proust though.

[Roger Slater]

John, though I most certainly do not recommend doing so, you can skip a lot of chapters without missing out on any plot developments. These chapters are easy to recognize, since they are devoted to learned and historical or philosophical disquisitions about whaling and whale boats. You can skip them and then pick up with the "story" in the next chapter.

This discussion has made me eager to reread the book. It really is amazingly great. If you read it, don't skip all the non-plot chapters. For example, the chapter called something like "On The Whiteness of the Whale" is not to be missed -- I know you are skeptical about non-rhyming poetry, but if prose can be great poetry, this is where it happens.