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7 - Melville: Romantic Cock-and-Bull; or, The Great Art of Telling the Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2010

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Summary

Chapter 99 of Moby-Dick, “The Doubloon.” Ahab is pacing his quarterdeck, as always, and stops to meditate on the sixteen-dollar gold piece that he has nailed to the mainmast as “the White Whale's talisman” and reward to whosoever raises Moby-Dick. Ahab, of course, will collect his own reward, since he is the one fated to discover the preternatural creature he has effectively conjured up, but now he pauses, before the payoff, to read his horoscope in this “equatorial coin” with its three Andes summits, tower, “crowing cock,” and cabalistic zodiac:

“There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here, – three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab, the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self … [T]his coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, 'tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”

As has often been observed, Ahab's reading of the coin is narcissistic or solipsistic – the Emersonian “noble doubt” run wild.

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In Respect to Egotism
Studies in American Romantic Writing
, pp. 189 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

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