All 12 Uses of
despair
in
Moby Dick
- What despair in those immovable inscriptions!†
Chpt 7-9 *
- I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair.†
Chpt 7-9
- Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me.†
Chpt 16-18
- Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.†
Chpt 40-42
- Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black night an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable shore.†
Chpt 43-45
- There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.†
Chpt 46-48
- Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on.†
Chpt 46-48
- It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a…†
Chpt 52-54
- Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.†
Chpt 64-66
- …of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing.†
Chpt 106-108
- As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face.†
Chpt 118-120
- But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.†
Chpt 130-132
Definition:
-
(despair as in: she felt despair) hopelessness; or distress (such as extreme worry or sadness from feeling powerless to change a bad situation)