duality is extended to their stature and their temperaments; Pip is a coward while Ahab is foolishly brave. The bond they share is that of madness. The Manx sailor describes the pair as, "One daft with strength, the other with weakness." (428)Ahab himself is an example of binary symbolism. Melville describes his aspect: "And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes on the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked." (200) Life and death are directly opposed other places in the novel, if not in conflict per se. On the above-mentioned whale skeleton, vines grow. "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories." (375) Even the lovely water is representative of death. If a sailor's attention wavers while at the mast-head, "perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever." (140) Thus Melville reinforces the opposition between the worlds above and below the surface of the sea.The duality of sex is also addressed in Moby Dick. At the Try Pots Inn, Mrs. Hussey forces Ishmael and Queequeg to choose between "Clam or Cod,"(64) which is to say, a vaginal or phallic symbol. The realms on either side of the horizon are again used to present a binary picture in this passage: "the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep." (442)Regarding duality, Whitman falls between Melville and Emerson. As his lines from" Song of Myself" illustrate "Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,/Always a knit of identity, always distinct...
