Moby Dick Lesson Plan

Discuss how Starbuck's internal conflict manifests itself in chapter 123.

Among the characters in Moby Dick, it is Starbuck who experiences the most vivid and acute internal conflict. As the character closest to Ahab and thus most privy to his madness and obsession, Starbuck allows the reader to get a more personalized but still external view of the captain, who emerges in this chapter as both the driven madman that Melville has described through the last hundred chapters but also as a weak and pitiable old man fully consumed by his personal demons. It is only when Starbuck glimpses this pitiable side of Ahab that he finally decides against murdering him for the sake...