Student Publications
Xi Chen
Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain
In the summer months before my first year of medical school, I unfurled the pages of Moby Dick. Immersed in the novel’s adventurous spirit and Shakespearean prose, I followed the narrator from the piers of Nantucket into the Atlantic and waded through Captain Ahab’s quest for the legendary white whale. I was ostensibly reading for fun—but in truth, what got me to read Melville’s classic was a rising and distressing awareness of the stage upon which I was about to walk. My future career in medicine loomed large in my mind, and I knew that the time for reading literary fiction was about to disappear…