Moby Dick

“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

Queequeg is exoticized and made to perform a misrepresentation of a “cannibalistic” Pacific Islander. One could argue this allows Ishmael to congratulation himself for his magnanimous lack of prejudice. Nevertheless, their intimacy is deep and touching, mirroring Ishmael’s intimacy with anyone who picks up his book.

“Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.” 

This is a rather impious sermon from a preacher, who commands that his congregates trust themselves rather than the “proud gods.” Ahab’s personality will be extended to the breaking point of disaster, but he is not alone. Even the clergy in Ahab’s world preach an intense adherence to the American principle of individualism.

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” 

This quote refers to Queequeg’s fictional home of Kokovoko, but it could refer to more familiar places such as Nantucket, which take on an imaginative hue that could only be recorded in Ishmael’s mind and heart. That Melville’s scope is the entire “watery world” of the Earth makes this statement even more expansive.

“But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.” 

Though Ishmael refers to Christian or non-Christian religious doctrine, he forcefully foreshadows Ahab’s zealous adherence to his own personality, which is akin to religion fervor. Like all morbid religious fascination, it aligns its adherents with death over life, and endangers all around them.

“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”

Throughout the book, Ishmael compares theoretical with practical expertise and finds even scientific theory wanting. This is understandable in an era which venerated pseudoscience along with legitimate science, one in which the work of laborers was heavily devalued. Ishmael takes to task discredited notions such as phrenology and physiognomy (determining personality by visual cues from the head and skull).

“Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.” 

Ahab’s advanced age is always at the forefront of Ishmael’s description of him, and it is a chief concern of Ahab, as well. This wakefulness is not cautious, however, but hallucinatory. Moby Dick took his leg and his mobility, but his mobility would be lost to time in either case. Ahab sees intention in brute beasts where there is none, and blames a white whale for the unfairness of his own universal inheritance of loss.

“For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.” 

Moby Dick is a porous book, filled with weird speculations and open ends. (Whatever did become of Bulkington?) It is grand and left open to the interpretations of its readers for centuries afterwards. Authority is a collective responsibility, Ishmael seems to say, and there is always more to be learned.

“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market." 

Starbuck is among the most tragic figures aboard the Pequod. Most everyone else is caught up in Ahab’s personality, cheering Ahab’s relentless pursuit forward. Only Starbuck sees the pursuit as the result of a mental illness that will lead to ruin.

“That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. 

The danger of Ahab is that he knows he is wrong and can describe that wrongness perfectly. He doesn’t care. Moby Dick becomes an arbitrary reflection of his own personality, one for which he just happens to have a ship, and a life’s experience, designed to destroy.

“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick.” 

This summary often refers to Ahab’s tormenting thought—the one personified by Moby Dick—as a wrestling with death and all that implies, but in the nearly two centuries since Moby Dick was published, many readers have invented many other valid and interesting interpretations for Ahab’s motive.

“To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.”

At the start of the novel, Ahab still has enough reason to understand that his crew will get out of line if they don’t try to catch as many whales as possible. Conveniently, this allows Ishmael time to go on an expository excursion, explaining in detail everything he knows about the operation of a whaleship.

“Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.” 

In the whale, a balance is struck between living within and without the world. As blubber protects the whale in all climates, so does a firm but pliable character protect the human soul from adversity.

“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

Moby Dick is a book swamped in analogy and metaphor, whose characters seek out deeper meanings within mere surfaces. Here, as Ahab talks to the head of a dead whale, he seeks but fails to find a metaphor that will set his life on a meaningful course.

“Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs, He saw God's foot upon the trendle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

From this point on, Pip and Ahab will be inextricably linked through their lack of reason, shut up together in Ahab’s cabin, feeding one another beautiful-sounding nonsense. In this way, the least authoritative person on the ship and the ship’s greatest authority are of one mind.

“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.” 

Ishmael and Queequeg are such eagles as described in this passage, able to shake off the dark and artificial light of industry and philosophy and live momentarily, and within the open light of day. Ahab, on the other hand, often references fire and furnaces in relation to his relentless pursuit.

“Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” 

Moby Dick is not just a large volume by weight. Its theme is that of life and death. The life and death of a flea means very little. Once found, it can be trivially blotted out. To kill a whale, however, the novelist must cross oceans of water to meet it.

“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.” 

Here, Melville indulges himself in a craft secret of the novelist, who seats himself like a God above the narrative. Crowds of people become cliches from this perspective. The great gift of individuality is that, when viewed up close, all people become interesting, as with the following biography in miniature of the carpenter.

“Of all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.”

The gulf between Queequeg and Ahab couldn’t be greater. Queequeg gives everything he has in life and treats death lightly. In this chapter, indulged, surrounded by friends, Queequeg suddenly decides death is a small matter, and decides not to die.

“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” 

Ahab’s chief concern is with death, particularly his own. We are born locked in an inevitable battle with death, he says. At worst, we are orphaned in that struggle, and must face it alone; he cannot see a better or less lonely course than this.

“In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.” 

Melville repeatedly emphasizes the importance of individuality. In Ahab, however, individualism is stretched beyond reason into megalomania and narcissism. Everything beyond his doomed imagination is vague and uncertain.

“I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” 

A “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing” guides Ahab forward to certain doom, and away from the friendship and wise counsel of Starbuck. A trick of grammar here make it unclear as to whether or not the narcissistic Ahab is referring to himself as God, but what is clear is that his position is lonely and alienated.

“Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief…Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.” 

In Ahab’s final, extraordinary soliloquy, no resolution is made, and no final lesson drawn. Ahab has wrestled with death throughout the novel, and even in these faltering moments of life, death remains both a greatness and a grief. It is a vexing problem that cannot be solved except through action, however faltering or absurd.

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” 

The sea is as ancient as death itself, with Moby Dick and Ahab only small and insignificant parts of the larger scene. The novel’s most significant moments of peace and serenity involve acceptance of and communion with the ocean and its mysteries.