I would like to talk about Pip. Why does he go crazy and what does it mean that he went crazy?
"Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? ... Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul." (321, chpt. 93)
Even this 'brightest castaway' was so affected by the awful lonesomeness that his soul was drowned. Either maddened or graced with divine Wisdom (I would lean towards maddened...), Pip, the cheery and bright ship hand, cannot recover from his solitary stint in the vast ocean. Does his blackness have anything to do with it? Not in an attempt to get into some discussion of how racist or not racist Ishmael and or Melville was, but rather in contrast to the white of the book (which could also be race fueled but that's not really where I'm trying to go here). How about a comparison between Pip's madness and Captain Ahab's?
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