Chapter 44 - The Chart Practice Quiz — Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville — tap or click to flip
Practice Quiz: Chapter 44 - The Chart
What does Ahab study every night in his cabin?
Large wrinkled sea charts of all four oceans, along with old log-books recording sperm whale sightings and captures.
What is Ahab trying to calculate from the charts?
The migratory patterns of sperm whales, so he can predict where and when to intercept Moby Dick.
What visual metaphor does Melville create with the swinging lamp?
The lamp casts shifting lines across Ahab's wrinkled forehead, making it seem as though an invisible pencil traces courses on "the deeply marked chart of his forehead."
What are whale "veins" as described in this chapter?
Narrow migratory lanes, a few miles wide, along which sperm whales swim with extraordinary precision when traveling between feeding grounds.
Who is Lieutenant Maury, mentioned in Melville's footnote?
An officer at the National Observatory in Washington who was constructing real migratory charts of sperm whales in 1851.
What is the "Season-on-the-Line"?
The annual period when Moby Dick has been repeatedly sighted near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, where most deadly encounters with him have occurred.
What significant event happened at the Season-on-the-Line location?
It is where Ahab lost his leg to Moby Dick—"that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance."
Why did the Pequod sail at the beginning of the Season-on-the-Line?
Because they could not reach the equatorial Pacific in time for the current season and needed the full year to sail south, round Cape Horn, and arrive for the next season.
What does Ahab plan to do during the year-long wait before reaching the equator?
Conduct a miscellaneous hunt across multiple oceans, hoping to encounter Moby Dick by chance in his "vacation" waters.
How does Ahab transform possibilities into certainties?
Through sheer force of will: "every possibility the next thing to a certainty," blending scientific reasoning with obsessive conviction.
What physical signs of Ahab's torment does Melville describe?
Ahab sleeps with clenched hands and wakes "with his own bloody nails in his palms."
What happens when Ahab's nightmares become unbearable?
He bursts from his stateroom with glaring eyes, and a wild cry is heard through the ship, "as though escaping from a bed that was on fire."
According to Melville, what separates from Ahab during sleep?
His soul (the "eternal, living principle") dissociates from his obsessive mind and seeks escape from the "scorching contiguity of the frantic thing."
What does Melville say Ahab's intense thinking has created?
A creature—his obsessive purpose has achieved "a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own," separate from his humanity.
To what mythological figure does Melville compare Ahab at the chapter's end?
Prometheus. Like the titan punished by Zeus, Ahab is consumed by the very creature (his obsession) that his own mind has created.
What makes Moby Dick individually recognizable, according to Ahab?
His peculiar snow-white brow and snow-white hump, plus his broad fins that are "bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear."
What word does Melville use to describe Ahab's obsessive thought?
Monomaniac—"that monomaniac thought of his soul."
What does "somnambulistic" mean in the context of this chapter?
Sleepwalking or resembling a sleepwalker. Melville describes Ahab emerging from nightmares as "a formless somnambulistic being."
How does Melville describe the tension between Ahab's method and his madness?
As "delirious but still methodical"—Ahab applies rigorous scientific reasoning to serve an irrational, self-destructive obsession.
What does Melville mean by calling tormented Ahab "a vacated thing"?
When Ahab wakes in horror, his soul has fled from his obsessive purpose, leaving only "a ray of living light" without an object—a consciousness emptied of its humanity.
What comparison does Melville draw between Moby Dick and the sun?
Just as the sun "loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac," Moby Dick lingers in equatorial waters during a predictable season.