As many commentators have pointed out, Moby Dick is first and foremost a naturalistic story of whale-hunting. There are careful technical descriptions about whaling and precise details are enumerated on everything from the whales themselves to the men that pursue them. But beyond the surface account, Melville has created a story with another level of meaning. This is not to suggest that the book should be read as purely symbolic. As Denham Sutcliffe explains, “It is not that things ‘stand for’ something else; they are inexorably themselves, but they begin to accrete meanings and associations. We begin to notice recurrent motifs, and an emphatic insistence upon certain objects and ideas, and suspicion finally becomes certainty that this story of the pursuit of the whale is a huge metaphor of which one face is to be taken literally and the other symbolically.” (FN1) This essay will focus on the whale in Moby Dick and the extent to which this creature encourages other meanings to be associated with it.

The whale is central to the story of Moby Dick. Whenever a whale is encountered in the story, the scene is usually one of horror. This horror is intensified by Melville’s contrasts between the calm, clarity of the weather and the seeming fury and irrationality of the whale. In these instances the contrast on a symbolic level may be seen as one between the power of nature and the smallness of man. The day may be calm and serene, man may be lulled into a sense of trust and contentment. But what man expects and desires cannot always be had from nature. Just as Jonah, in the Biblical story “Jonah and the Whale,” experiences the power and wrath of God via nature, so the sailors in this story experience the power of nature. In this story, however, often the experience of nature prevails before a sense of spirituality or God is realized (if it is realized at all).

The scholar Howard Vincent sees in Moby Dick the epitome of natural power. In The Trying-Out of Moby Dick he says that “though Moby Dick is a monument to the greatest whale that ever swam the seven seas, it is not, however, the biography of that fish, since it reconstructs but one episode from Moby Dick’s career. But even though the climax of Moby Dick is fiction, it sprang from a vortex of tradition traceable through an odd assortment of records.” (FN2) Vincent lays great importance on the factual bases of the story. Many others take care in pointing to this same factual basis about whales and whaling in particular. While the exactness of Melville’s information is indeed a point of strong interest and says a great deal for his powers of observation and his skill as a researcher, it is nonetheless more important from a literary point of view to consider the effect that these details have upon the reader.

Vincent says that “there is almost no expository fact in Moby Dick which does not have some narrative or themistic function besides.” (FN3) It is this latter function which acts upon the reader in an unconscious way. Even though one may analyze the work from many points of view, it is important to keep in mind that much of the effect is on an unconscious level even though analysis, by definition, must occur on a conscious plane.

The whale in this story is seen at different times as symbolic of different things. Sometimes it brings associations of goodness. Other times it is the antithesis of good and seems to be a completely evil creature. The whale may also be associated with nature in general and may be used to emphasize the contrast between the power of nature and the weakness of man. For instance, even with all his cunning, Ahab is unable to destroy nature in the form of the whale. Ahab finally succumbs to nature at the end of the story. He goes down with the whale. He is tied to the whale as the whale leaves the surface of the water and goes down to the depths of the sea.

The sea is the whale’s home. It is here where the whale lives in comfort which contrasts with man’s discomfort. On the surface of the ocean man cannot see below the water, and he does not know what lies below. Man may be reminded that there is more to the ocean than what is immediately visible. What is not visible is in greater proportion to what is. The sea is the home of the whale, and the whale lives in a home which is largely inaccessible to man. This endows the whale with a quality of mystery. The whales are often depicted with only their tales on the surface of the water. When they do their destruction, they eventually leave the surface of the water to go down to their home. Man cannot go there. Man does not have access to part of the whales’ lives, and it is a source of terror to him.

Part of the terror associated with the whale comes from the actual physical destruction which is caused to the whaling boats by the whales. Part of the associated terror also emerges from the above-described mystery about the whale. Part of the terror is tangible; part of the terror is not. Melville acknowledged this directly:

For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness heredity to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. (p. 181)

Moby Dick is especially associated with terror which is heightened by the unknown elements. For a portion of the story it is not clear whether Moby Dick is real or a figment of Ahab and other sailors’ imaginations. “For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence.…” (p. 180) Moby Dick is described as “haunting” the sailors. Haunting is something associated with non-reality. When something is haunting, its presence and memory is as important as its physical reality. Moby Dick is such a creature. What the whale symbolizes in the sailor’s minds—the terror and potential power that he is associated with—is as important as the whale’s actual potential for such terror. Moby Dick is attributed with a capacity for vengeance which is really in the minds of the avengers. But such a personification of the whale shows even more clearly that in the minds of men such as Ahab, he has been endowed with supernatural qualities. For Ahab, the reality merges with his conception of it, and after a point it doesn’t matter what the physical status of the whale is—his symbolism has become all-important.

While Melville makes it impossible to ever forget the physical reality of whales in general and Moby Dick in particular, the significance of the whale lies in its capacity to generate feelings associated with its power and link to the sea. Although the whale is capable of destruction, it is man, not the whale, that actively seeks to destroy. As Denham Sutcliffe says in conclusion, “the whale does not ‘stand for’ the beauty and terror and mystery of Creation, but he strongly suggests them all, becomes their symbol.” By the end of the book, Moby Dick has been seen as many things to many men. The strength of the vision ultimately determines the effect. The whale does not destroy Ahab, for instance, Ahab forces destruction upon himself.

Footnotes
1. Denham Sutcliffe, “Afterward,” in Moby Dick (New York: Signet, 1961), p. 538.

2. Howard Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 163.

3. Howard Vincent, p. 227.

Bibliography
Baird, James. Ishmael. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet, 1961.

Sedgwick, W. E. Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944.

Vincent, Howard. The Trying Out of Moby Dick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

Ujhazy, Maria. Herman Melville’s World of Whaling. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1982.

Zoellner, Robert. The Salt-Sea Mastodon. L. A.: University of California Press, 1973.

Since the revival of interest in Herman Melville in the early 1920s, Moby-Dick, the author’s sixth novel, has come to be considered his masterpiece. Part romantic sea tale, part philosophical drama, the story of Ishmael, Ahab, and the white whale combines Melville’s experiences aboard the whaler Acushnet with his later immersion in such classic authors as William Shakespeare, John Milton, François Rabelais, and Laurence Sterne. After several years as a sailor, both in the whale fleet and in the United States navy, Melville returned to his native New York in 1844 and soon began writing about his experiences. His earliest works, such as Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were loosely based upon his time in the Marquesas Islands and Tahiti. Melville’s third novel, Mardi (1849), though a failure, showed evidence of a greater ambition to write enduring works of literature. Just two years later, that ambition would find its fullest expression in the pages of Moby-Dick, a symbolic tale that dramatizes the struggle to find meaning in a complex and hostile world.

Moby-Dick is narrated—or, more accurately, “written”—by a sailor who calls himself Ishmael, after the biblical outcast and son of Abraham. As a young man not fully initiated into the mysteries of life, he undergoes a type of spiritual and philosophical education during the course of the novel. Initially hostile and potentially suicidal, he heads for the whaling fleet, hoping to exorcise some of his anger at the world. Before he can find a ship, however, his poverty forces him to share a bed in a seedy inn with a bizarre and frightening “cannibal” named Queequeg. Carrying a shrunken head and a tomahawk that doubles as a peace pipe, Queequeg suggests both death and life. Indeed, after sharing a bed with this harpooner, Ishmael is a changed man. He has experienced the first of a series of encounters with the mysterious “otherness” or strangeness of nature. In symbolic terms, he has embraced death in the form of Queequeg, and when he wakes the following morning he sees the world from a different perspective. Ishmael understands the mixture of life and death that Queequeg’s tomahawk/pipe suggests and realizes, at least at that moment, that experience can lead to renewal.

The other major influence on Ishmael’s growth is certainly the captain of the Pequod, Ahab. Named for an evil king in the Old Testament, Ahab demonstrates the dangers of an excessive focus on ideas. The object of his obsession is of course the white whale, nicknamed Moby-Dick by the sailors. On the voyage previous to the one described in the novel, Ahab lost one of his legs to Moby-Dick, and by the time Ishmael’s story begins, he has sworn to take his vengeance by hunting down and killing the great whale. It soon becomes clear, however, that Ahab’s fixation has more to do with what the white whale represents than with Moby-Dick himself. As Ahab explains in a notable speech to the crew, for him “all visible objects” are like “pasteboard masks” that hide “some unknown but still reasoning thing.” Ahab hates “that inscrutable thing” that hides behind the mask of appearance. The only way to fight against it, he explains, is to “strike through the mask!” Moby-Dick, as a mysterious force of nature, represents the most outrageous, malevolent aspect of nature’s mask. To kill it, in Ahab’s mind, is to reach for and seize the unknowable truth that is hidden from all people.

Ahab’s attitude toward nature is often referred to as a “monomania,” a tendency to see everything in terms of himself. This vision of the world contrasts markedly with that of Ishmael after his first encounter with Queequeg. Under the influence of the more naturalistic “savage,” Ishmael learns to understand what he sees from more than one perspective. He also begins to realize that objects in the world can have more than one meaning because meaning originates with the observer rather than the object. In chapter 99, for instance, Ishmael describes how Ahab and several members of the crew interpret a gold doubloon that Ahab has nailed to one of the masts as a reward for the first person to spot Moby-Dick. Though the marks on the coin never change, each man’s description is different, revealing more about his own thoughts and ideas than about the coin. Ahab, in the grip of his monomania, declares that each symbol on the coin “means Ahab” and that the whole coin is a reflection of the world as he sees it. Ishmael, by contrast, refuses to insist upon a single meaning for the objects he encounters. He gathers as much information and as many opinions as he can, suggesting that all readings are both partially valid and yet always incomplete.

The central dramatic event of the novel, Ahab’s hunt for the whale, thus describes the consequences of conceiving of the world as a mask that hides unknowable truth. Ahab’s frustration with the limits of human knowledge leads him to reject both science and logic and embrace instead violence and the dark magic of Fedallah, his demonic advisor. Like Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, he has made a pact with the devil, selling his soul for the secrets of the universe, only to find himself caught in the snares of his prophet’s deception. Thinking himself immortal, Ahab attacks Moby-Dick, striking at the mask of appearance that supposedly hides ultimate truth. What he fails to realize, however, is that such truth exists only beyond the limits of the physical world; only in death will Ahab be able to reach the “unknown but still reasoning thing” and learn what cannot be known in this world. Accordingly, his attempt to kill Moby-Dick brings about his own death. His devotion to the idea that truth exists behind or beyond the physical world forces him to destroy himself in the attempt to reach it.

Ishmael, on the other hand, escapes destruction in large part because of his different attitude toward the physical world. While Ahab sees nature as deceptive, Ishmael learns to concentrate on the complexities and beauties of what he sees. Rather than imagine a truer world beyond that of the senses, Ishmael revels in the details of the world around him, compiling information and observations on the business of whaling, on the Pequod’s crew, and on the inexhaustible wonders of the whale itself. Indeed, for Ishmael the whale becomes the overwhelming symbol of life itself and of the search for knowledge represented by the book that bears its name. The book’s encyclopedic breadth is meant to suggest the vastness of his subject and the wealth of all sensual life. “Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan,” Ishmael tells us, “it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.”

Because of its tremendous scope, Moby-Dick offers information and comment on a wide variety of topics related to nineteenth-century life. For instance, critics have often described the Pequod as a microcosm, or “little world,” that represents social and political life in pre-Civil War America. Understood this way, Ahab and Ishmael stand for opposing political and social theories. Autocratic Ahab, with his Shakespearean speeches and dependence on magic, suggests an aristocratic ruler who maintains power through threat and superstition. Ishmael, on the other hand, appears to represent the radical democracy of America itself. His concern for others, his tolerance of different religions and cultures, and his resilience in the face of social collapse all mark him as a distinctly American character who opposes the old-world values of Ahab.

Other readers have commented on Melville’s use of eastern religions and mythology, as well as his reliance on the relatively recent discoveries of Egyptian archaeology. In this vein, some have compared Ishmael’s vision of the circularity of life and death to similar conceptions in Hinduism and Buddhism. His friendship with Queequeg in particular is often cited as evidence of his adoption of non- Western religious or philosophical views. Likewise, his descriptions of the whale often rely upon references to Egyptian architecture and writing to suggest both the whale’s great antiquity and its mysterious power. On the whale’s skin Ishmael sees “hieroglyphic” marks that, like Queequeg’s tattoos, seem “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining the truth.” Moby-Dick’s “high, pyramidical white hump” suggests a mixture of geometrical purity and ancient knowledge. And the ocean itself, source of both life and death, becomes in Ishmael’s mind a place of miracle, a “live ground” that “swallows up ships and crews.”

Moby-Dick also provides an unprecedented view of the whaling industry in mid-nineteenth-century America. Ishmael’s detailed descriptions of the hunting, capture, slaughter, and butchering of sperm whales both celebrates and questions the violent energy of American commerce. In one respect, the whaling industry demonstrated heroic action and astonishing efficiency. American ships, manned by sailors of all nations, circled the globe to gather the oil that fed the lamps of homes throughout the country. Hunting whales in small boats launched from ships demanded enormous courage, skill, and strength. And it seems proper that the democratic Ishmael should praise the traits of character that made such an industry possible. In other respects, however, the tremendous violence of whale hunting suggests a world deeply at odds with nature. Disturbing doubts arise as Ishmael discovers, for instance, that the Pequod is owned by pacifist Quakers and that the violence that is necessary to run the whaling industry may very well produce the madness that plagues Captain Ahab.

With the completion of Moby-Dick in 1851, Melville knew he had produced an extraordinary book. His friend and neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the work is dedicated, sent him a letter praising the accomplishment. Commercially, however, the book was at first a failure. Melville’s reading public still considered him the author of entertaining sea tales, and people were not prepared to accept his ambition to write a masterpiece. Melville’s subsequent work fared even worse, and by 1857 he had given up writing short stories and novels and had turned instead to poetry. Despite this change of format, however, the central concerns of Moby-Dick never disappear from Melville’s writings. Throughout his poetry and even as late as his last known prose narrative, Billy Budd, Melville continues to explore the conflict between acceptance and aggression best represented by Ishmael and Ahab.

Raymond Weaver, one of the critics to rediscover Melville in the early twentieth century, has called Moby-Dick “an amazing masterpiece” that reads “like a great opium dream.” Despite its difficult passages, complex philosophical content, and unusual and sometimes awkward form, the book has sustained continuous and often extreme attention from readers for the last eighty years. Like the meaningful world it creates and describes, Moby- Dick seems inexhaustible, reflecting that “image of the ungraspable phantom of life” that, according to Ishmael, “is the key to it all.”

Source: Clark Davis, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999. Davis is an associate professor of English at Northeast Louisiana University,

Throughout Moby-Dick, the theme of human isolation is prevalent. Each character exists as an island. While they influence each others’ lives, they can never fully understand each other or experience a merger of souls. This is one reason Ishmael admits to a “strange sort of insanity” when he tells how he felt when squeezing the sperm in Chapter 94. He wanted then to say to his companions: “Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves … universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.” His was, indeed, a “strange sort of insanity”, as he looks back on it, for Ishmael has come to realize the truth of man’s unalterable isolation. This is a central theme not only in Moby-Dick but also in Melville’s other work, both his fiction and poetry. He saw man living utterly alone in a world where overwhelming questions have no positive answers. [In Studies in Classic American Literature (1964)] D. H. Lawrence saw to the heart of Melville’s concern with human isolation when he wrote that Melville “pined for … a perfect relationship; perfect mating; perfect mutual understanding. A perfect friend,” but knew in his heart that such communion cannot be because “each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings.”

The theme of loneliness is dominant in the reasons for Ishmael’s survival. A great deal has been written on why only Ishmael is allowed to escape death. [Writing in his The Trying-out of Moby-Dick (1949)] Howard Vincent believes that Ishmael undergoes a “spiritual rebirth”, symbolically portrayed in his being saved. Only Ishmael is saved, argues Vincent, because only he has “obtained the inner harmony unrealized by Ahab”. James Dean Young [writing in American Literature, January, 1954] feels that it is Ishmael’s “humanity” that saves him. And C. Hugh Holman argues [in Studies in Classic American Literature (1964)] that Ishmael survives because he alone “of those on the Pequod has faced with the courage of humility the facts of his universe.”

These interpretations, which see Ishmael’s survival as his reward for a lesson well learned, are not entirely satisfying. It may be possible to make a list of the characters in Moby-Dick and then find some flaw in each—except Ishmael—but such an approach surely does violence to the novel. By almost any standard Queequeg is noble, courageous, and humane to the last. Starbuck is characterized as sensitive, tender, and mature. They are both at least as worthy of being saved as Ishmael.

But the point is that it is not at all clear that physical survival is Melville’s symbol for spiritual salvation or even for moral superiority. Ishmael is not saved because he is a deeper thinker, or because he is more humane, or because he is stoical. The others of the crew do not die because they are being punished for following Ahab or for other assorted shortcomings. They are simply victims of Ahab’s destructive design. Man has, as Ishmael puts it in the “Monkey-Rope” chapter, a “Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.” Ahab is their banker and their apothecary.

Melville chose to save Ishmael for at least three reasons, all of which are closely related to the meaning of the book. The first is that Melville wished to objectify the idea of man’s loneliness through Ishmael. In spite of the “Siamese connection”, which men have, they are, paradoxically, incapable of sharing each others’ deepest and most meaningful thoughts and intuitions. Having Ishmael die with the rest of the characters would have, in a sense, made him a part of the group. But he is Melville’s representative of man, alone in the universe, and saving him—only him—projects this image brilliantly. Perhaps the book’s most unforgettable image is of Ishmael, after the sinking of the Pequod, alone in the eternal sea, in “the great shroud of the sea [which] rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Although “the Fates ordained” as Ishmael puts it, that he should be rescued, he feels merely like “another orphan.”

Ishmael’s feeling about the Fates pervades the book and offers a second explanation for his survival. From the early pages, one senses the inevitability of the events, what Ronald Mason calls [in The Spirit Above the Dust (1951)] “fatal compulsion”. But precisely how to account for the strange workings of “the Fates”—this is the unanswerable question which haunted Melville throughout his life. He resented dogma of all sorts which claimed to solve the riddle of the universe. In Moby-Dick doctrines of many kinds abound. Father Mapple’s sermon on Jonah has been offered by some as the key to the book, but this interpretation, I suggest, goes contrary to all Melville believed. While there may be partial truth in what Father Mapple says, it scarcely accounts for the existence of a man like Ahab or for what he has to do, drawn on by the necessity of his innermost being. The sermon which the cook Fleece preaches to the sharks is as relevant to Ahab as are Father Mapple’s words. For Ahab is like the sharks; he can no more turn back from his search than they can become “civilized”. From Father Mapple’s Christianity to Queequeg’s pagan idol worship, the doctrines so frequently mentioned in the book simply underscore the fact that life’s deepest truths are unfathomable. By what appears to be sheer chance, Ishmael is thrown from his whale boat at a crucial moment and is thus saved from the fatal encounter with Moby Dick. Ishmael survives to illustrate the inexplicability of life, another of the book’s important themes. He is not, to restate an earlier point, allowed to live because he is morally better than anyone else aboard the Pequod.

The third reason for Ishmael’s survival is in one sense the most obvious. He must live because he, after all, is the teller of the story. A great deal more is involved here than the obvious technical necessity of keeping the first-person narrator alive. And here we return to a consideration of the book’s strange, wild tone. Melville kept Ishmael alive to show the later effect of the Pequod experience upon his mind. Why does Ishmael tell his story? Because he has to. Since shipping on the Pequod, he has wandered the earth, but it is what happened on that first whaling voyage that preoccupies him. Everywhere he goes, he feels the necessity to tell of Ahab and Moby Dick, just as the seemingly mad Elijah does in an early chapter of the novel. For example, in Chapter 54, Ishmael relates how he told part of the narrative—the “Town-Ho’s Story”—in Lima, “one Saint’s eve”. In a good many ways, Ishmael is similar to the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge. In Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”, Ishmael refers to Coleridge’s poem and tells of the “clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread” suggested by the albatross.

The references in Moby-Dick to Coleridge’s poem suggest an influence which is borne out by a comparison of the book with “the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Although critics have referred in passing to certain similarities in Moby-Dick and Coleridge’s poem, the subject has not received extensive treatment nor has one of the most important similarities—the states of mind of the two narrators— been clearly shown. W. Clark Russell made a provocative statement when he wrote in 1884 [a remark quoted in Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log (1951)] that Moby-Dick “is of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ pattern, madly fantastic in places, full of extraordinary thoughts, yet gloriously coherent.”

To give a brief synopsis, the poem is the narrative of a sailor, who begins upon a promising voyage only to fall under a curse because he wantonly kills an albatross. After days of thirst, the Mariner sees a strange ship, which comes alongside. On it are two spectres, Death and Life-in-Death. They gamble with dice for the Mariner and the crew, Life-in-Death winning the Mariner and Death the rest of the men. Soon all members of the crew perish, leaving only the Mariner. The loneliness overcomes him, and he suffers profoundly. Later he experiences a sense of love for the creatures he sees in the ocean and is partially redeemed for his earlier sin of killing the bird. But—and this is an extremely important point in the poem—he has seen and felt too much to remain completely sane. His ship is manned by spirits that use the bodies of the dead crew, and finally it arrives in the Mariner’s home port, where it sinks, leaving the Mariner as the sole survivor. He is picked up from the sea by a pilot, the pilot’s son, and an old hermit. They think him mad, and he does seem to be partially insane. This entire story he tells to a wedding guest, who is anxious to get to the ceremony but is retained in fascination by the wild eyes and manner of the narrator. The Mariner must tell his tale because it is the only way he can relieve himself of the terrible burden with which the experience has left him. Since he was picked up by the pilot, to whom he immediately related the incidents of the voyage, he has wandered the earth, frequently feeling the deep need to tell other human beings what he has been through.

This summary may suggest some ways in which the poem is different from Melville’s novel, but many ways in which the two are fundamentally similar. The Mariner’s sin is a wanton act of cruelty. Ishmael commits no such act. He does, to be sure, take a vow with the rest of the crew to join Ahab in his frantic search for revenge, but this vow is by no means the primary cause of a curse. Ahab, and not Ishmael, brings on the destruction of the Pequod. Other, but less essential differences are also apparent. But the similarities are, nevertheless, striking. While Ishmael’s vow to follow Ahab is not of the magnitude of the Mariner’s sin, he is sorry for it. He takes the oath in a frenzy born of Ahab, whose “quenchless feud” seemed his. Later when he sits with other members of the crew squeezing whale sperm in the tubs before them, he negates his earlier vow: ‘I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it.”

In just such a moment the Ancient Mariner feels the weight of guilt leave him as he contemplates the colorful water snakes before him:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Ishmael’s survival is a result of the same kind of interplay of fate and chance represented in Coleridge’s poem. But the most important similarity in the two works is the profound loneliness which both narrators feel, a loneliness which penetrates to their very souls and produces the wildness, the half-madness which is evident in their narratives. The effect of the Mariner’s loneliness is apparent in the following passage, which comes after he explains how he was the sole survivor:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

Then toward the end of the poem, he tells his listener:

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

The ordeal of the Ancient Mariner, his facing of almost unendurable loneliness, is basically the ordeal of Ishmael. In both works, the experience leaves the character with a burden, which at times makes him all but unstable. That Ishmael has been left this way by his having witnessed the events he retells and by his experiencing the most intense loneliness is indicated in Chapter 93, “The Castaway.” This chapter ostensibly deals with the cabin boy Pip, but it clearly is concerned with Ishmael’s fate, too. Both are castaways. Pip was taken into one of the whale boats because of the illness of one of the sailors. But he could not contain himself during the dangerous whale chases. Consequently, he jumped overboard. Stubb, master of that particular boat, warned him that if he jumped again, he would be left behind. Ishmael fully realizes what it means to be abandoned in the sea:

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

By “the merest chance”, as Ishmael puts it, Pip is rescued, but he is maddened by the experience:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, 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 treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

The words that end that chapter are highly significant, because they link Ishmael, who is also thrown into the sea and left behind, only to be rescued by merest chance, with the maddened Pip: “For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself.”

What I should like to suggest by this reading of Moby-Dick is that the narrator, a man highly sensitive by nature, has himself been “carried down alive to wondrous depths” of truth and that this collective experience, terminating with his isolation in the sea, a symbolic projection of man’s frightening plight in life, has left him in the state of mind which characterizes the tone of the narrative. If there is a certain wildness about Moby-Dick, as the early reviewers felt, it is Ishmael’s. Such a reading accounts for the so-called inconsistencies of point of view and gives Ishmael the stature and importance which a first-person narrator should have. But more importantly, to see the effect of the events on Ishmael’s mind is to feel the impact of the book’s theme with profound and dramatic force.

Source: William B. Dillingham, “The Narrator of Moby-Dick,” in English Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1, February, 1968, pp. 20-29.

Moby-Dick … is ultimately a study of evil. But what sort of evil? What is Melville’s notion of evil? Evil’s first apparent manifestation (or so it is interpreted by Ahab) is the White Whale’s mutilation of his leg. But the Pequod meets an English whaler whose captain has had his arm torn off by the same whale; this man is not maddened, nor does he regard the event as more than a perfectly natural, though fearful, accident incurred in the routine business of whaling. His sensible conclusion is that, as far as he and his men are concerned, this particular whale is best let alone. Now, Ahab, a deeper man by far, is obsessed not only with what seems the injustice of the excruciating treatment accorded him (he was delirious for days after the accident, and convalescent for months); he is obsessed too, as we have seen, with the notion of hidden forces in the universe. More than this, he is a sinisterly marked man, with a long, livid, probably congenital scar (an emblem, surely, of original sin); with a record of blasphemy and certain peculiar, darkly violent deeds; with a series of evil prophecies hanging over him; and with the given name of an idolatrous and savage king.

All this is fittingly suggestive preparation for the complete deliverance of Ahab’s soul to evil through obsession and revenge. But his motive for revenge is not simple, not merely wicked. His quest for Moby Dick is in part a metaphysical one, for he is in revolt against the existence of evil itself. His vindictiveness, blind as it is, and motivated by personal hurt, is nevertheless against the eternal fact of evil. He thinks “the invisible spheres were formed in fright,” feels his burden is that of all mankind (“as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise”), thinks the White Whale either the “principal” or the agent of all evil. He, Ahab, is evil, Melville seems to say (through Starbuck and Ahab both), because he seeks to overthrow the established order of dualistic human creation; and yet he is admirable, for he has gone over to evil not merely, like Faustus, for purposes of self-gratification, but in angry and misguided protest against its existence and its ravages in him.

What inevitably happens is that, in casting himself as the race-hero opposing the existence of the principle of evil, he but projects his own evil outward (“deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale”) and so becomes all the more its avatar and its prey. He would “strike through the mask” of the visible object (the agent of evil), hoping there to find the key to the riddle. His occasional suspicion (“Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond”) that this will not result in any discovery whatsoever, and so not in an effective revenge, deters him not at all, though it drives him ever in upon himself as his fatal hour approaches, till, near the end, he does see the working of evil in himself—and yet dies its avowed agent. For he is mad; he is “madness maddened,” quite conscious of his own derangement, and obsessed with it. The final, terrifying chaos, then, is that which he discovers within himself as his vestigial sanity contemplates his madness and its futility, as he admits his incomprehension of the thing that has driven him to irreparable folly and has lost him his very identity (“Is Ahab, Ahab?”):

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it [the very language used earlier to describe evil]; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time?…”

Here is raised even the question of whether man, this proud and splendid aristocrat of the spirit, is indeed a free agent; Ahab, having at other times defied all the gods and called them cricket players, having assumed and never doubted that he could have made himself lord of creation, now turns (in “The Symphony”) from Edmund’s flouting, freewill cynicism to Gloucester’s craven determinism: “By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.” He is not captain of his soul after all.

Ahab knows, then, everything about his predicament except its cause in himself—and so its solution. He feels the cause to be an immemorial curse visited upon all men. An exile from Christendom, he yet perceives and abhors the existence of evil. Worse still, he resists it; he will not come to terms with it. He wishes it could simply be swept away, or covered over: “Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.” But the dark side (which cannot be concealed) cannot be explained or avoided, either. And the most maddening thing of all about it—this is a constant refrain throughout the book—is the deceptive way it lurks beneath a smiling and lovely exterior. (“These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather.… Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!” And on the very morning of the last terrible day of The Chase—

“What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.”)

Ahab’s tragedy (and, on this final level, the book’s theme) is, then, his inability to locate and objectify evil in himself, or to accept it and deal with it prudently as part of the entire created world, and so to grow despite it and because of it; it is his own fated indenture to evil while he seeks to destroy it, and his more and more precise knowledge of what is happening to him. It is the magnificence and yet the futility of his attempt. “I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent,” he cries to the great impersonal spirit of fire which he acknowledges as his maker and which, as its individualized creation, he defies. He defies his paternal maker, light, because, discovering his own dual nature (he says he never knew his mother), he has revolted and leagued himself now with darkness (the unrecognized mother-symbol, standing here for a regressive identification, which is of course what supplies the destructive energy). Then, “I am darkness leaping out of light,” and “cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him.… So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.” And at his death, the magnificent line—as great and moving in its utter verbal simplicity, and yet as fraught with complex resignation as Edgar’s “Ripeness is all”: “I turn my body from the sun”—a line whose full and exact significance has been specifically constellated in advance by his own apostrophe to the dying whale in Chapter CXVI.

Ahab is no Faustus. He always has a choice. Many are the times he backslides; the tension between humanity and will is constantly active. Pip, the piteous embodiment of warmly instinctive human nature, of all that Ahab must tread on in himself, acts several times as the unwitting touchstone of that humanity. “Hands off from that holiness!” But, “There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady … and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.” Starbuck too again and again is the foil and the polar opposite; and once Ahab even finds it good to feel dependence on human aid, for when the White Whale has crushed his ivory leg in the “Second Day,” he exclaims while half hanging on the shoulder of his chief mate, “Aye aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes … and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.” And just once, in “The Symphony,” “Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.”

He must remain, for the brooding Melville apparently and for us, a symbol of that independent spirit and will which, scorning all “lovely leewardings,” pushes off from the haven of all creeds to confront an ultimate chaos in the human soul; admirable, perhaps, beyond all flawed heroes (Bulkington was too simple an embodiment—pure essence, he was fit only for deification) in his energy and his courage, but condemned to split at last on the rock of evil, the very thing he willed out of existence; fated—and magnificently, agonizingly willing—to become the pawn (no, the prince, the king) of evil in consequence of his misguided revolt, to lose his identity in the end because he sought to exalt it against the immutable principles of its creation.

Source: John Parke, “Seven Moby-Dicks,” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, September, 1955, pp. 319-38.