Question

If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. What is the meaning of this excerpt?

Answer 1

In this excerpt of Moby D*, Ahab has lost his strength, he is weary and exhausted, but hid madness, his desperate desire of revenge strengthen him and keeps him moving forward.

(Sorry for the spelling in the title's book, it seems to be a curse)

Answer 2

To explain the fragment we should pay attention to the name of the character: Ahab. It means uncle in Hebrew and is well known because A. Melville used in his novel 'Moby D-i.c.k' (1851).

In the fragment, we read a detailed description of the emotion of the character. This emotion envolved Ahab at a precise moment in which he apparently faces death. He feels a mad force, some power only comparable to the resistance of an entire army troop.

The narrative construction uses a third-person narrator, which reveals the feelings that Ahab experienced. It is a moment of great narrative tension, possibly the passage that begins the end of the story.