The Moby-Dick Bible
< Back to the concordance

Symbolism › Charmed Circle

Charmed Circle

1 passage in the novel carry this mark, in the order they appear.

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.

Chapter 48, The First Lowering · verse 35

Read in context >