to surrender to that dark power. It would not be outlandish to say, in fact, that this dark temptation is one of the reasons the captain and the sailors go out to sea in the first place to make their living. They are always to some degree at the mercy of the great and unpredictable power of the sea, of nature. The typhoon is a sudden and extreme form of that power, and all the sailors, according to the captain, feel an irrational desire---an "impulse"--- to surrender to that powerful natural force in order to experience something special "to know what one might find there naked and alone." Do they seek madness, or death itself, in such an impulse? Certainly, there is something of both the desire to feel as much as life itself can offer, and the desire to transcend life itself, either in madness or death.
In any case, the monkey appears. He is not only a terrifying presence on the ship, representing the power of nature on land rather than on sea, but he is also one who has experienced precisely what the sailors w
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