Ahab and the Carpenter – what’s in a man?

Ahab and the Carpenter – what’s in a man?

In chapter 107 we encounter a new and very important character, the carpenter, who mirrors Ahab in certain aspects; the comparison between the two becomes evident in the following chapter, called Ahab and the carpenter, which cuts a chain of episodes narrated by Ishmael about the physiology of the whale and returns to the dramatic plot, with stage directions.

He does everything on the boat, he’s a part of almost everything yet nothing seems to affect him, like Ahab doesn’t seem to be affected by his surroundings.  He is disconnected with the world as Ahab is.

We get the sense that the carpenter isn’t very intelligent, yet he is operated by an instinct and can do almost everything useful; that is in contrast to Ahab, who can have long soliloquies in Sheakspearean English yet can do any good to his ship.

The contrast between the carpenter’s inner thoughts and Ahab’s thoughts as the leg is being repaired are interesting. The carpenter deals with mundane issues and Ahab is philosophical as usual, comparing the carpenter to Prometheus, the maker of man. 

So could there be a connection between the unthinking automaton and the god like hero? Ishmael says in chapter 107 that there is a strange contradiction in the fact that man in the abstract is a wonder but a main in the mass is ordinary and a “mob of unnecessary duplicates”.

Ahab may be in higher social strata than the carpenter and yet he must depend on him to get his ivory leg in-tact. Though his soul aspires to great heights, he is “cursed to be that mortal inter-debtedness” (chapter 108).