August 6, 2019 - Chapter Ninety-nine

This chapter, “The Doubloon,” returns us to the topic of radical subjectivity and each crewman’s different perception of the same situation. In this case, the subject being analyzed is the coin Ahab nailed to the mast in an earlier chapter as a promise of reward to the man responsible for bringing in Moby Dick. Here, Ahab looks upon the coin first, followed by his mates and on down to several unnamed crewman, who appear as disembodied voices before the chapter ends. As before, the theme here is that we are islands unto ourselves – our perceptions are shaped by our individual experiences, and so the extent to which any two people perceive the same object or event in the same way is more coincidental than anything else. In short, there is no objective truth.