Moby Dick

Moby Dick is a book without a traditional protagonist. Ishmael’s personality is strong, but he is along for the ride, as the saying goes, happy to take orders once upon ship, and to sort through the data points and stories concerning whaling life without changing their course. Ahab, on the other hand, behaves much more like the story’s antagonist, or like a complex Shakespearian villain, than like a protagonist with traditional development and swings of fortune. What happened to shape Ahab’s personality occurred prior to the events of Moby Dick, and where he is heading is only doom.

There are emotional cracks in his fiery armor, but even at his gentlest and most rational, we see Ahab from afar seated at his position of authority. When Starbuck is able to reach him and remind him of the pleasures of home and family, Ahab makes it clear that those things are indeed worthwhile, but that he views them as if through a long tunnel; he is separated from them. This is the same tunnel through which he foresees his own death. Ahab’s tragedy is his authority to guide himself and his own crew by the light of a mental illness he knows and understands. 

Starbuck is the Pequod’s emotional anchor. Neither a literary dreamer out for experience like Ishmael, nor an obsessive like Ahab, Starbuck has one serious aim: to return to Nantucket and his wife and children a richer man, with life and limb intact. The question of Starbuck is why he does not act more decisively to meet this modest goal, killing Ahab when he has the chance, and therefore saving the lives and livelihoods of his crew. Does the relative modesty of his goals lead to a modesty of the heart. Ahab is animated by a battle with death itself. It makes his soul larger, and increases his passionate and reckless authority. Starbuck’s dreams are sensible, but they are not the dreams that drive a person to kill in cold blood.

Pequod is a skilled harpooner and Ishmael’s close companion. He is described from the perspective of a white novelist portraying the perspective of a white protagonist, as such, he is rendered with prejudices that are both conscious and unconscious. Ishmael he makes a great show of cowering before Queequeg’s strangeness upon first meeting but makes just as great a show in accepting and loving him for who he is. In some ways, Queequeg is the philosophical Noble Savage of Jean Jacques Rousseau: capable, self-reliant, and possessing of an infallible moral compass which puts other characters to shame. In a more critical reading, however, Queequeg is an unreal reflection of that sterling character, a person who comes from an imaginary locale, one who acts as a blank slate onto which a white man projects his own fantasies and desires.

Though Ahab’s mission dooms Flask and Stubb, they are not spiritually degraded by the hunt for Moby Dick as Starbuck is. Flack, the small and stubborn “King-Post” of the book, finds himself matching authority with Ahab and immediately concedes defeat. Stubb is cheerful in the face of death, singing through some of the Pequod’s most life-threatening disasters. Both men are alike in their fatalism, playing out their roles like planets in their orbits. The tragedy of their deaths from a narrative point of view is that these orbits are interrupted. With all of their flaws and merits considered, they would have been fine mates on any other ship.