August 23, 2019 - Chapter One Hundred Twenty-nine

In this brief dramatic chapter, we are treated to an inside view of Ahab’s relationship with Pip, the black sailor whom Ahab has been keeping in his cabin for some time. Ahab intends to leave to go on deck, and Pip wants to come with him, but Ahab refuses. Here, we are reminded of the homosexual undercurrent of the novel, first with the “marriage” between Ishmael and Queequeg and now the cohabitation between Ahab and Pip. In the latter relationship, the power differential is clearly off – Ahab is the most powerful aboard the Pequod, while Pip is a mere sailor and black to boot. Still, the “love” between the two men is somewhat purer and less ambiguous than that between Ishmael and Queequeg – that relationship is never explicitly sexual, and while that between Ahab and Pip is not either, it is much more clearly intimate and sensuous in a way that Ishmael and Queequeg’s is not.