August 11, 2019 - Chapters One Hundred Six and One Hundred Seven


We return to the narrative in these two chapters and are treated to a bit of information we haven’t heard earlier, i.e., that Ahab has a groin wound from being poked there by his ivory leg, and that’s why he’s spent much of his time below during the voyage. This seems like a key bit of information to have withheld for well nigh 500 pages of the novel, but there you are. At any rate, it seems likely that this will be important information to the climax of the novel, to say nothing of the chapter for tomorrow, in which the ship’s carpenter will have a soliloquy – or so we are directly told at the end of today’s second chapter.

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