nced by the Nature-perfect image of Geraldine's frail, exquisite, battered beauty before Geraldine makes her first deceptive statement. The unreliability of human reason is also applicable to the problem of determining the "reason" for which the mariner shoots the albatross--a reason that remains ambiguous and unstated while the text focuses on the act itself and on the remorse that the mariner has carried into old age. The wedding guest, watching the mariner who has mesmerized him with his gaze, asks a direct question:Having been obliged to supply their own reasons for the mariner's behavior, the readers are led to draw the appropriate moral, which is more explicitly identified: But that does not reach discourse of the original motivation for the death of the albatross. The fact that the mariner's fate, characterized by his highly consequential confessional mode of life, has been interpreted as life experienced as "abjection" (May), as a parable of existential guilt and angst (Gill), and as a mechanism of resolution of the universal identity crisis (Waldoff) indicates the extent to which ambiguity informs the pattern of ideas in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The rime itself has been characterized as the wedding guest's nightmare (Stockholder 30f), and the multiple images of the dying crew, first occurring at sea and ultimately recurring when the mariner is on the point of returning to "mine own countree," suggest nothing so much as the ambiguity attending the confusing narrative action of nightmares. In that regard, the mariner's invocation of sleep as "a gentle thing, / Beloved from pole to pole" resonates with irony and ambiguity. He drifts off only to be visited by the groans of the dead men inhabited by spirits and demons who discuss the manner in which he will expiate his guilt: "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do." Stockholder (43ff) develops the idea that the mariner's nightmarish experiences are like a dream that fails to resolve the te |
