Though Pip is alive, he has seen God and been rendered imbecile. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul,” Melville writes. “Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths… He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense.”
