Plot Overview
In Chapter 114 of Moby-Dick, the Pequod penetrates deeper into the Japanese cruising ground, and the crew spends long stretches -- twelve, fifteen, even twenty hours at a time -- pulling, sailing, and paddling after whales, often with little success. During calm intervals, the ocean takes on an almost enchanted quality: the sun is gentle, the swells are slow and smooth, and waves purr against the gunwale "like hearth-stone cats." Ishmael warns, however, that this "tranquil beauty" conceals a "tiger heart" and "remorseless fang" beneath the surface.
The Sea as Land
One of the chapter's most striking passages transforms the Pacific into a pastoral landscape. The rover in his whale-boat feels a "filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea," regarding it as "so much flowery earth." The distant ship's masts seem to wade through tall prairie grass like the ears of western emigrants' horses. extends the metaphor into "long-drawn virgin vales" and "mild blue hill-sides" where "play-wearied children lie sleeping," until "fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole."
Ahab's Tarnished Golden Key
Even Ahab is not immune to these "soothing scenes," which serve as "secret golden keys" that briefly unlock his own "secret golden treasuries" -- hence the chapter's title, "The Gilder." Yet his breath upon these treasures proves "but tarnishing." The calm does not heal Ahab; it merely highlights the gulf between what peace could offer and what his obsession destroys.
The Meditation on Life's Cycles
The chapter's philosophical centerpiece is an extended, unmarked meditation -- ambiguously belonging to Ahab, Ishmael, or both -- on the cyclical nature of human life. The speaker laments that "there is no steady unretracing progress in this life" but rather a recurring passage through "infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt, then scepticism, then disbelief," arriving at "manhood's pondering repose of If." Once completed, the cycle begins again: "we are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally." The passage culminates in an unanswerable existential question: "Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?" and the anguished image of humanity as orphans whose "unwedded mothers die in bearing them."
Starbuck and Stubb Respond
The chapter closes with brief soliloquies from Starbuck and Stubb, each gazing into the "same golden sea." Starbuck sees "loveliness unfathomable" and chooses faith over fact, declaring, "I look deep down and do believe." Stubb, characteristically, leaps up "fish-like, with sparkling scales" and simply affirms his jolly nature. Together with the preceding meditation, these three responses -- existential anguish, quiet faith, and cheerful acceptance -- offer three distinct philosophies for confronting the mystery that the golden ocean both reveals and conceals.