Captain Ahab is the monomaniacal commander of the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, driven by an all-consuming desire for vengeance against Moby Dick, the great white whale that bit off his leg on an earlier voyage and left him with a prosthetic leg carved from whalebone. Ahab drives his crew, including the narrator Ishmael, across the world's oceans in pursuit of the whale, subordinating the ship's ordinary commercial purpose entirely to his private obsession and defying the warnings of his more cautious first mate, Starbuck. Ahab's final confrontation with the whale destroys the Pequod and kills nearly the entire crew, and his monomania has made him one of literature's most studied figures of destructive obsession, a symbol invoked across philosophy, psychology and popular culture ever since. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Narrative RoleSourced to the subject's own accountAntagonist-protagonist, the Pequod's captain whose obsessive quest drives the novel's plot to catastrophe 1 Defining TraitSourced to the subject's own accountMonomaniacal obsession with vengeance against the white whale that destroyed his leg and now consumes his reason 1 Narrative role (class)Sourced to the subject's own account FAQs
Where does Captain Ahab get his name?
From the wicked Biblical King Ahab. Captain Peleg tells Ishmael so directly before the Pequod ever sails, warning that the old king came to a bad end.
Before Ishmael ever meets Ahab, the ship's co-owner Captain Peleg explains the name comes from the idol-worshipping King Ahab of the Books of Kings, telling Ishmael "he's Ahab, boy, and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king." Ishmael, unsettled, asks whether dogs licked up the wicked king's blood when he was slain, the same fate scripture gives Ahab. Melville plants the parallel early so Ahab's own doomed, godlike defiance reads as the fulfillment of a name he was given, not a coincidence.
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Source Captain Ahab (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Captain Ahab (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
He is the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship Pequod. On a previous voyage, the white whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab's leg and he now wears a prosthetic leg made out of ivory.
- Character In: Moby-Dick
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