Of all the characters in Moby-Dick, an argument can be made that Pip is one of the most important. Bright and goodnatured, Pip survives a most terrible event, and is obviously never the same after he is left behind to confront the infinite indifference of the ocean, and of the world.
“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
What did you all think of what happened to Pip? And what, exactly do you think happened to him? Is it more than just losing one’s mind after being left for dead on the ocean? (As if that isn’t enough?)
He’s a stand-in for Melville to talk about the horrifying, incomprehensible size of the ocean when truly appreciated by the human consciousness, but I’m not sure I see him as important or interesting.
I’m not trying to be cynical: At some point, he probably started drinking heavily. “Madness” at that time wasn’t exactly treatable, and some of those deemed crazy resorted to self-medication.
Pip is a person who sees too much. As such, he’s almost a kind of warning, and perhaps even a small shadow of Ahab himself.
I don’t have anything interesting to say about Pip other than guessing at why it is that Ahab is so entranced and pulled to him later, but I am sure there are whole books that could be written just on Pip and what/who he represents in the novel. I guess one question is would anyone be driven to insanity after that experience, or was it because Pip was a bright and spirited person? In the end, I think Melville gives us at least 3 different methods of dealing with terrible adversity/experiences…Certainly Pip being lost on the ocean is similar to Ishmael at the end…although neither experience is detailed. But these different ways of dealing with adversity mean something to me… Ahab’s (insanity and fatal obsession with revenge), Pip’s (insanity and losing one’s grip on the world in a way that gives up–not tears after), and Ishmael’s–which is to explore the world, never stop learning, and to write is amazing book for us.