Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

155finds “a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows” (51) silentlycontemplating the inscriptions. In fact, the frigid inscriptions on the walls of the Chapel are“deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all faith, and refuseresurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave” (53). The visual representationof the inscriptions on the marble of the chapel proleptically announces what willhappen to the Pequod and its crew. The first inscription memorializes a whaleman who “was lostover board near the isle of desolation, off Patagonia” (51) and foreshadows the death of awhaleman who fell from the mast, “the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look outfor the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up inthe deep” (491). The second inscription which records the death of the crew of “the ship Elizawho were towed out of sight by a whale, on the off-shore ground in the pacific” (52) refers to thedisappearance of the whaling ship Rachel and the ultimate destruction and disappearance of thePequod in the vortex the White Whale created. The third inscription is dedicated to the memoryof captain Ezekiel Hardy “who in the bows of his boat was killed by a sperm whale on the coastof Japan” (52), and it foreshadows the death of Ahab. Even the painting in chapter 57foreshadows the death of Ahab:On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippledbeggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing thetragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one ofthe boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is beingcrunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, hasthat man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But thetime of his justification has now come. (266)