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What were your initial reactions to Ahab's Wife (the persona and the novel)?

How would you describe your relationship (with the character and the book)?
In what ways do you see this novel (not?) operating as a finale for this course about choice?

Honestly, my initial reaction was confusion... I didn't know anything about this subject and didn't have a background information, more because I didn't read Moby Dick. I guess the concept was hard to grasp throughout the book. However, the book was easy to read with a natural-flowing style of writing. The diction and sentence fluency helped keep the reader going, even if the plot was a bit chaotic. As with Una, her adventurous and fearless characteristics are so different from mine, that I don't know how I would've reacted or responsed to such events.

I always saw this class as a discussion of choice. Whatever subject we talked about, choice seemed to be the main factor: whether we ate meat or not, chose to betray the other (Prisoner's Dilemma), which food we ate (caterpillars), what we believed (optical illusions), and even whether we conformed to cannibalism (even discussed in Ahab's Wife along with the journey across Utah/California). I honestly think that there could've been a different option for the finale of this course. Ahab's Wife does involve a lot of choice, but another book could've focused more on the reasons behind the choice, whether than Una simply acting on her instincts. I also wish that the last book was something that a lot of us could easily understand- perhaps because I didn't read Moby Dick or novels that helped form a background to Ahab's Wife, I wasn't able to fully grasp the idea and concepts behind this book.