Moby-Dick Chapter 110 Summary

Summary

While the crew works to uncover and hoist deeper stowed casks, Queequeg, the tattooed harpooneer, is struck by a severe fever that brings him close to death. Employed in the hardest, most dangerous tasks, Queequeg wastes away in his hammock; yet as his body thins, his eyes take on a luminous, almost spiritual quality that impresses the sailors with awe. Believing himself near the end, he requests a Nantucket-style dark canoe as a coffin—an arrangement that recalls his island funeral customs and his fear of being tossed into the sea in a hammock. The carpenter measures and constructs the coffin from old dark planks aboard, and Queequeg has it furnished with personal items: his harpoon iron, a paddle, biscuits, a flask of water, a little bag of earth, a pillow of sail-cloth, and his god Yojo.

Queequeg lies in the closed coffin to test it, crosses his arms with Yojo, and asks to be rehoused in the hammock; Pip, in his disturbed state, entreats Queequeg to find him in the afterlife, then mocks and exalts him alternately. After the trial of the coffin, Queequeg suddenly rallies, announcing that he cannot die because he remembers unfinished duties ashore; he claims sovereign will over life and death. He recovers rapidly, eats with appetite, leaps to his feet, practices with his harpoon, and repurposes the coffin as a sea-chest, carving its lid with grotesque figures echoing his tattoos. The chapter ends with the narrator reflecting on the inscrutable hieroglyphic meaning of Queequeg’s tattoos, a living enigma even to himself, and with Ahab’s astonished exclamation at the man's inscrutability.

Key events

1. Queequeg contracts a near-fatal fever while laboring in the hold.
2. He requests a Nantucket-style dark canoe as his coffin and the carpenter builds it.
3. Queequeg tests the coffin by lying within, placing Yojo and personal items inside.
4. Pip speaks to Queequeg in his delirium; sailors react.
5. Queequeg unexpectedly recovers, claims willpower kept him alive.
6. He reclaims health, uses the coffin as a sea-chest, and carves its lid.

Analysis

This chapter serves several functions: it deepens Queequeg’s character, underscores themes of death, ritual, and cultural difference, and provides a moment of darkly comic human drama that punctures the voyage’s tension. Queequeg’s near-death experience foregrounds the shipboard economy of risk—harpooneers carry unique mortal burdens—and reveals how ritual and belief shape a man’s response to mortality. The coffin-canoe links Queequeg’s island cosmology with Nantucket custom, juxtaposing ‘‘heathen’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ practices and inviting readers to question simple hierarchies of belief. The episode also explores agency: Queequeg’s claim that deciding to live can defeat sickness asserts individual will against contingency, a theme that will contrast with other characters’ confrontations with fate.

Stylistically, Melville alternates reverent, almost sacred description (the saintly, widening eyes; the ‘‘rings of Eternity’’) with sly nautical humor (the carpenter’s matter-of-factness; the coffin becoming a sea-chest). The coffin functions as a potent symbol: simultaneously a deathbed, a cultural artifact, and later a practical container—suggesting the porous line between life and death, reverence and utility. Pip’s presence and speech provide a counterpoint: his delirious apostrophe highlights the emotional bonds among crew and offers an unpredictable, quasi-prophetic voice. Finally, the chapter tightens structural contrasts—Queequeg’s mystery and Ahab’s inscrutability are set in relief—and reinforces the novel’s recurrent preoccupation with signs, hieroglyphs, and the unreadable depths of human identity.

Important quotes

“As all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened.”

NarratorDescribes the paradoxical spiritual luminosity of Queequeg’s eyes as his body wastes away, evoking reverence and mystery at death’s approach.

“No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes were without a keel;”

NarratorExplains Queequeg’s request for a Nantucket-style coffin-canoe and connects his island customs to local whaling practice.

“It was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him:”

NarratorSummarizes Queequeg’s belief in sovereign will over life and death, which he credits for his sudden recovery.

Characters in Chapter 110

• Queequeg
• Pip
• Starbuck
• Ahab
• Yojo