ABOUT THE CHAPTER 112 "THE BLACKSMITH"

The chapters 108 – Ahab & the Carpenter – and 112 – The Blacksmith – are devoted to the artisans who work at the ship. Although these chapters are separated from each other with the four chapters, the blacksmith and the carpenter are working simultaneously – one is making the ivory leg, another one is forging the shackle for it. But the chapters are absolutely different. If in the chapter about the carpenter we have a play, so there is no voice of the author or narrator, but in the remarks; the chapter about the blacksmith is his life-story told by the implied narrator. The Blacksmith was a wealthy man; he was married and had three children. But once he became an alcoholic and lost all his wealth. His wife and children died and he became a tramp. He was seeking for death but instead he “went a-whaling”.

In this chapter once again the author considers the ocean as an alternative to death. It is probably a long way between life and death :

“Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful new-life adventures.”

 Who is a narrator here? Is it Ishmael? Probably, but there is no evidence for it: no remarks on the first person, no references to the past and so on. The Blacksmith told his life-story to the mariners. Ishmael might be one of them. But in this chapter there is a sort of the evaluation and the attitude that are proper to the author himself. For example:

“He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow’s technical called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruby children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove.”

There is a bitter irony in this idyllic picture. Probably in its banality – a nice house, a nice wife, a nice job and all this comes to the end. Who’s speaking – the narrator, the author or both? In my opinion it is one of the rare chapters in this book when there is a clear voice of the author.