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Chapter 71
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Moby-Dick, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Limits of Knowledge
Fate and Free Will
Nature and Man
Race, Fellowship, and Enslavement
Madness
Religion
Summary
Analysis
Ishmael goes back to the process of “flensing” (or skinning) the whale of its blubber, stating that the man actually doing the cutting on the back of the whale, partially submerged in the water, was Queequeg. Ishmael was tied to Queequeg via something called the monkey-rope, meaning that the two were bound “as Siamese twins,” and in Ishmael’s mind, this embodied the ties between all men, the ties that keep men together and the ties that injure men, too, when something happens “on the other end of the rope.” Queequeg finishes a long day’s work of skinning the whale while Daggoo and Tashtego lance the sharks that are swimming nearby with their harpoons.
Another instance of ropes, or lines, in the novel. Here, instead of simply entangling and endangering men, as does the harpoon-line on a whale-boat, the “monkey-rope” ties together Ishmael and Queequeg. This helps each of them to continue skinning the whale, but also makes both vulnerable—were one of the men to fall, the other would fall as well. This means of support is also a means of potential destruction, as are so many tools aboard a whaling ship, and as are the non-physical connections that bind men together .
Themes
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