Describe Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.

Ahab is set apart from all others by his personal
experiences and singular focus on killing his adversary, the whale.  In this light, Ahab
is driven by demons that no one else can understand or grasp.  Being abandoned at an
early age and convinced that the whale attacked him out of malice, Ahab is unreachable
in his desires for revenge.  Ahab is depicted as almost Shakespearean in magnitude, in
that he is the victim of tragedy that he himself helped to cause.  Ahab has not
understood the need to be able to accept real conditions of consciousness and work
through them.  Rather, he is driven to overcome these elements.  He is animated by
appropriating the world in accordance to his own subjectivity, as opposed to working
through what is there.  In this light, I think that Ahab is the type of figure that is
the victim of tragedy that is caused by his own hand.  Accordingly, the idea of Ahab
being set apart or being physically and emotionally distant from all others might be a
good starting point in describing him.