Plot Summary
Chapter 135 of Moby-Dick is the novel's devastating climax. On the third morning of the chase, Captain Ahab orders the Pequod to reverse course, realizing he has overshot the White Whale during the night. After an hour of tense waiting, Moby Dick is sighted again. Ahab delivers a farewell soliloquy from the masthead—a sweeping meditation on the wind, mortality, and the unchanging sea—before descending to lead the final assault.
In a poignant exchange with Starbuck, Ahab acknowledges that ships sometimes sail and are never seen again. The two men shake hands, and Starbuck weeps, begging his captain not to go. Ahab tears himself away and lowers his boat. Sharks immediately swarm around it—a grim omen noted by Starbuck, who delivers his own tormented interior monologue about fate, family, and approaching death.
The Final Encounter
Moby Dick surfaces spectacularly, rising from the deep draped in trailing ropes and harpoons from the previous days. describes the whale as "combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven." The whale attacks the boats, and on his body the crew discovers the half-torn corpse of Fedallah the Parsee, lashed in coils of harpoon line—fulfilling the first part of Fedallah's prophecy that he would go before Ahab as his "pilot." Ahab recognizes Fedallah's body as "the hearse that thou didst promise."
Starbuck makes one last plea: "Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" But Ahab pursues, even as sharks gnaw his oars to splinters. He darts his harpoon into the whale. Moby Dick then turns on the Pequod itself, smiting the ship's starboard bow with his forehead. As the ship begins to sink, Ahab cries out: "The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse! its wood could only be American!"—fulfilling Fedallah's second prophecy.
The Catastrophe
In his final speech, Ahab delivers the novel's most famous lines: "from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." He hurls his harpoon a final time. The line runs out, catches around his neck, and he is dragged silently into the sea. The Pequod sinks in a great vortex, taking the entire crew with it. Tashtego, still nailing the flag to the sinking mast, catches a sky-hawk between hammer and wood—the ship drags "a living part of heaven" down with it. The sea rolls on "as it rolled five thousand years ago."
Themes and Literary Significance
This chapter brings together every major theme of the novel: obsession and monomania, the inscrutability of nature, fate versus free will, and the destruction wrought by unchecked vengeance. Fedallah's prophecies are fulfilled with cruel precision, echoing the witches in Macbeth—technically true yet fatally misleading. Starbuck's final helpless protest against Ahab's madness represents reason's last stand against fanaticism. The sinking of the Pequod and the death of its entire crew constitute one of the most powerful catastrophes in American literature.