This chapter attempts to explain why Captain Ahab hates Moby Dick so much. The obvious reason is because the white whale bit his leg off. But, on a deeper level, the whale represents something more intangible. Melville explains it in this way:
"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning...he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."
After losing his leg, Ahab went a bit mad. And while, on the surface, he now appears relatively sane, the truth is that he is, secretly, still pretty insane.
