Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab is the obsessed sea captain in Herman Melville's novel *Moby-Dick*, who loses his leg to a white whale and dedicates his life to hunting it down.
The name has become shorthand for monomaniacal pursuit of revenge or an impossible goal at any cost: He's become Captain Ahab about this lawsuit—it's consuming him.
- whaleHuge sea mammal
- obsessionPersistent, intrusive preoccupation
- revengePunishing a wrongdoer
- harpoonBarbed spear for whales
- PequodFictional whaling ship
peg leg · wooden leg · ivory · madness · sea · Melville · call me Ishmael · monomaniac · hunt · white whale · whaling · vengeance · nemesis · man vs nature · doom · Nantucket · ocean · lost at sea
- Fictional CharactersAlice, Oliver Twist, Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Bilbo Baggins
- Captainsskipper, Blackbeard, Ahab, Kirk, Nemo
- Legendary VoyagersOdysseus, Ulysses, Jason, Sinbad, Aeneas
- literary charactersSherlock Holmes, Scout Finch, Elizabeth Bennet, Macbeth, Huck Finn
- Sea Storiessea voyages, Odyssey, nautical tales, Robinson Crusoe, shipwreck story
- seafarerssailor, seaman, mariner, able seaman, merchant seaman
Captain AhabIshmael
Cast-out firstborn son
Siddhartha · Atticus Finch · Marcus Aurelius · Gandalf · Buddha
Captain AhabJacques Cousteau
French undersea explorer
Queequeg · John Muir · harmony with nature · St. Francis of Assisi · Ishmael
Captain AhabStarbuck
Captain Picard · Ernest Shackleton · servant leader · shepherd · protector
captain, captains, captaincy, captaincies, captained, captaining