...confrontation he forces the full violence of its dynamic into a willful apocalypse of the human community — "all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." Yet there is something more to Ahab, something other, than the courage and charisma of a towering self-trust....

...the only man--lshmael, in whose person Melville has told the story-- survives to report that "...the shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." [p. 565] Reflection Most of us have had something of Ahab's experience. I want something and try to...

...European aggression and expansion, MobyDick is a narrative of conquest; at the end of the novel, as "the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago," all members of extra-European worlds are absent.38 Only the white storyteller survives, buoyed by Queequeg's...

...father was Starbuck, and both went down, leaving small birds "screaming over the yet yawning gulf ... all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."156 11. BOMBING THE PENTAGON? Taking off from peacenik evocations of evil at the Pentagon, I earlier...

...Ahab destroys his quadrant, shouting: "Science! thou vain toy!" (p. 1058). In the end, all collapses, "and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago" (p. 1102). Melville's masterpiece not only addresses the issue of the disappearance of whales. His...

...relevance are the lines leading to the "Epilogue," with their evocation of the time of Noah's flood: "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning...sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago" (572.). Moses is also evoked elsewhere, most notably in "The Affidavit," where Ishmael claims, "I had...