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Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is sometimes considered the Great American Novel. Its oftenriveting action scenes, its labyrinthine structure, its Shakespearean dialogue and characterizations – these make Moby-Dick a work of kaleidoscopic complexity. Purportedly an adventure story about a young man seeking his fortune aboard a doomed whaling vessel, Moby-Dick is actually an investigation into the nature of man, God, and nature itself. Ahab, the fiery captain of the Pequod, is one of the most iconic characters in all of literature: a Godseeking man, wronged by nature, determined to pierce through the veil of base reality and get at the deeper stuff. Is Moby-Dick about the dangers of monomaniacal leadership? The evils of religious fervor? The tragedy of being human? Or all of these?

HERMAN MELVILLE: A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Herman Melville was born in New York on August 1, 1819. His father was an importer and merchant, and Melville’s early childhood was unimpeded by poverty. His father, Allan, described Herman as “backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension” but “both solid and profound” where he did understand. But by the time of his father’s death in 1832, the family’s fortunes had waned. To help the family financially, Melville began clerking at a bank; meanwhile, he studied classic literature at school. In 1839, at the age of 20 and at his now-bankrupt older brother’s behest, Melville signed aboard as cabin boy for a merchant ship, the St. Lawrence. This was to be only the first of Melville’s voyages.

His journeys to the South Seas made far more of an impression on him than his first voyage. He learned a love for the native people, including the Typees who would become the chief subject of his first wildly successful novel, Typee (1846), about his experiences in French Polynesia. The glare of his harsh judgment fell mostly on so-called civilized people who targeted the so-called savages: 

They [the natives] esteem us, with rare exceptions, such as some of the missionaries, the most barbarous, treacherous, irreligious, and devilish creatures on the earth. This may of course be a mere prejudice of those unlettered savages, for have not our traders always treated them with brotherly affection? Who has ever heard of a vessel sustaining the honor of a Christian flag and the spirit of the Christian Gospel by opening its batteries in indiscriminate massacre upon some poor little village on the seaside – splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent?

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Melville concluded that the “result of civilization, at the Sandwich Islands and elsewhere, is found productive to the civilizers, destructive to the civilizes.”

More of Melville’s seafaring adventures, including involvement in a failed mutiny, found their way into his second novel, Omoo (1847). That same year, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, a member of a prominent Massachusetts family. He wrote more books over the succeeding years, but his larger development as an author was shaped more by review of Shakespeare and his newfound friendship with Nathanial Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. 

In 1851, Melville published Moby-Dick. Melville truly labored on Moby-Dick. He wrote to author Richard Henry Dana, Jr. that the book would be “a strange sort of a book … the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”

The book was a critical and commercial failure. 

In 1852, Melville published Pierre, which puzzled critics and was yet another failure. 

The last novel Melville published was The Confidence-Man (1857), another bizarrely confusing text rife with cynicism about America.

Melville spent the rest of his life writing shorter work, largely uncelebrated. His last novel, Billy Budd, was completed in 1891 but wasn’t published until 1924, long after his death. When he died in 1891, he died largely unnoticed. 

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“CALL ME ISHMAEL”

Moby-Dick has perhaps the most memorable opening line in all of literature: “Call me Ishmael” has been repurposed and parodied countless times. Yet the main character of the book, Ishmael, is odd. Ishmael himself carries the narrative for the first two hundred pages of the book, nearly disappears for the middle several hundred pages, and then reappears for the final act. His individuality merges into the character of the crew, and perhaps that’s the point: Ishmael represents an individual’s tendency to fall prey to the overwhelming power of a common cause and charismatic leader.

Ishmael begins the book as a neophyte, a non-whaler searching for a job. We know from the outset that his search for a job is truly a search for a deeper meaning – as he says, “I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. … This is my substitute for pistol and ball.” He attends church, but he is at best an indifferent Christian. In fact, he seems to bear a downright hostility toward religion, for some unspecified reason: “And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” Ishmael quickly embraces Queequeg, despite his pagan cannibalism, observing, “Better [to] sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” In fact, Ishmael’s broadmindedness means he can observe in Queequeg something extraordinary: “there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. … Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.’

Is this a strength of character or a weakness? As the novel develops, it becomes clear that Ishmael is prepared to submerge himself into the worldviews of others; he remains perfectly sanguine about the notion of living under the rule of a captain: “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about … I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way …” Furthermore, as Ishmael is socialized by the crew, he adopts their pagan philosophy: “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.”

That vulnerability to outside influence will lead him to join Ahab’s mob rather than resisting it. The Pequod is a ship of cannibals from the outset, “a cannibal of a craft.” And Ishmael becomes a cog in the wheel. By abandoning the Christianity of his youth and embracing a pagan set of values – not merely adopting in friendship someone of a different culture – Ishmael has opened himself wide to the seduction of other causes. 

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THE QUESTION OF NATURE AND MAN

In Ishmael’s mind – indeed, in the minds of nearly all the characters in Moby-Dick – whaling represents something higher. It is not merely making a living. It is a pursuit of something more romantic, something more meaningful. But what is nature? Is it merely an arbitrary, mindless ubiquity, surrounding us but always treating us as foreign? Or is it a representation of a higher world? Is nature random and cruel? Or does it reflect some logic and order? Are we simply passing through this world, or are we embedded inextricably in it?

At the very least, nature is a wonderland, dangerous and seductive. Melville’s descriptions of seafaring capture the mind’s eye in extraordinary fashion:

There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.

What gives such sights and experiences true meaning, however?

Here, Melville offers a multiplicity of perspectives.

First, there is the religious man, represented by Father Mapple, who believes that the yoke of God lies upon mankind and that man’s obligation is to fulfill his duty no matter the suffering. The question of nature is superfluous; only God’s demands matter, in the end. Giving his sermon on Jonah, from a pulpit carved to look like the prow of a ship, Mapple – a former whaler himself – explains the message of the Biblical story: 

[Jonah] leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. … [E]ternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath – O Father! – chiefly known to me by Thy rod – mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?

Ishmael is less sure of God, but he is sure of the eternal nature of man. He believes that the soul of man is eternal, and the material world a mere chimera. Thus, “three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.” Nature is a veil through which man can glimpse something beyond. Ishmael waxes poetic upon seeing a rainbow through the misty spout of a whale:

And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

Ishmael is happy in his ignorance. He is blithe about the problems of human existence. He would prefer to act in the world rather than ponder such questions. To Ishmael, both Locke and Kant ought to be tossed overboard: “So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right.”16 Ishmael is no man of religion or philosophy. Never look directly into human suffering, Ishmael suggests – to do so brings with it madness: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Then there is the pure nihilism of Stubb, the ship’s second mate, who never seems to worry about anything. He comforts himself with the belief that he is merely a thing of matter. To him, life is merely a joke: “[A] laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one[’s] comfort’s always left – that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated.”

For Ahab, however, all of this is far too easy. Both Father Mapple and Ishmael are far too sanguine in their willingness to ignore the realities of human pain; Stubb recognizes human pain but obviates the reality of man’s higher being. In Ahab, by contrast, we find a man who desires to gaze directly into the deepest and most chilling of all human problems. Ahab asks the question Father Mapple elides and Ishmael ignores: If God stands behind nature, if there is something higher that binds the universe together, why should He allow the suffering of innocents? Where is God’s justice? And if God abandons justice, why should we follow Him?

AHAB, THE PROPHET

We don’t meet Ahab until about a quarter of the way through the novel. But we know of him from how others speak of him. We know that he has lost a leg to Moby Dick. We know that he went mad, and supposedly recovered. We know, too, that he has a young wife and a son at home. He is described in colorful fashion by Captain Peleg, one of the owners of the Pequod:

He’s a grand, ungodly, godlike man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. … [H]e’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!

Peleg is correct in his assessment: Ahab is at once the most religious and the most pagan figure in the book. He speaks beautifully, in language from the Bible or Shakespeare; he invokes God regularly; and yet he acts as a pagan. He is no atheist – no, his faith in God, a God he cannot comprehend and upon whom he wishes vengeance, is ardent and passionate and unquenchable. 

Ahab is a man of bone and gristle and iron, built “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.” But he is, for all of that, more human than anyone else in the narrative. He both fears death and seeks it. He fears his old age and yet defies it. He hates God and yet refuses to abandon faith in Him.

Ahab clearly suffers from depression – depression brought about by the loss of his leg, yes, but of something more: his belief in Divine Providence smiling upon him. He cannot even smoke a pipe enjoyably; he lives in the open air, afraid to descend to his cabin. He is burdened by his physical being, made strange to other members of the crew – indeed, to the rest of humanity:

[S]ocially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!

It is precisely Ahab’s outsider status, though, that grants him his authority. His subordinates are “as little children before Ahab.” That, and his passion. His vision. His passionate belief that there must be a meaning to things. Ahab speaks to the human heart better than Starbuck, the traditionally religious first mate, who demotes Moby-Dick to the status of a “dumb brute … that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

No, replies Ahab, the world is no mere brute force. It is a world of intent and meaning and rules and consequences. That is why Moby-Dick must be destroyed, says Ahab – because the white whale’s presence bespeaks either a blot on justice, or provides a gateway to a higher truth inaccessible by man:

Hark ye yet again, the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknow but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. 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 be me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

Ahab calls to us because in his fiery rage, he stands for the glory of mankind: mankind, raging against the mere physical, against the injustice of the universe, seeking something more behind the pasteboard mask. And if Christianity will not bless his quest, perhaps paganism will. By the end of the novel, Ahab has moved squarely into the camp of the pagans, just so long as they guarantee him his quest: 

Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb? … ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab.

Whatever tool is at his disposal, Ahab will use to pursue the whale. As Melville writes, 

“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” Ahab is remorseless. Ahab is pitiless. Ahab is unrelenting. “I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.”

And yet.

Ahab is not nearly as unrelenting as he seems. He is touched by the doubts that plague the rest of his crew. He seems to mirror Stubb when he questions his own freedom of action:

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

He is kind to Pip, a black hand driven mad by abandonment in the midst of the ocean. Recognizing the senselessness of the universe, he is still sometimes driven by human connection: “ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”

But in the end, Ahab casts these supposed weaknesses aside. He denies the Rachel his help in searching for a lost boy, despite his own child at home. His personality and vanity and greatness are wrapped up in his quest, and he will not, in the end, be denied that quest:

I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. 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.

STARBUCK, THE FAILED DEMOCRAT

As the crew is drawn into Ahab’s monomaniacal orbit, it seems that no one can stand up to him. He preys on the greed of the crew, nailing a “Spanish ounce of gold” to the mast, pledging it to whichever man raises the whale. He preys, too, on their outsized desire for a common cause. Ishmael, who is drawn into the chase, observes, “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”

Most of all, Ahab preys upon the claim that all demagogues make: that he will singlehandedly slay injustice, and restore some sense of balance and correctness to an inscrutable universe. It is not just Ahab who fears and hates the whale. Ishmael notes that “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” That whiteness represents, says Ishmael:

[T]he heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. … [T]here is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows, a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? … [A]ll deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within, and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge – pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper. … And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

As John Updike aptly sums up, “Moby Dick represents the utter blank horror of the universe if Godless.”

Ahab promises to slay the beast, to solve the riddle, to untie the knot.

But there is one man who should stand up to Ahab’s tyranny: Starbuck. Starbuck is a religious man, popular with the crew, realistic and pragmatic. He is a Quaker, an “earnest man,” a “staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. … Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence.” He is cautious, he is careful; he is connected to normal life, desirous of returning to his wife and child. He is a sort of model man, filled with an “august dignity … not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture … that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!”

If Ahab is a Macbeth-like figure, driven toward tragic action by both fate and will, then Starbuck is like Hamlet – a good man, afraid of sinning in the name of that good. He never has the strength to stand up to Ahab. Starbuck knows his own incapacity, but he cannot seem to fathom it. On the one hand, he does not understand that passion overwhelms reason: “My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! … Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries; – aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!” Starbuck clearly sees in Ahab the tyrant. And yet he has not the courage to do away with that tyrant. Despite the omens, despite his certain knowledge of Ahab’s madness, he does not have the stomach to do what must be done:

Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together? – And would I be a murderer, then, if” – and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door.

But he cannot assassinate Ahab. His democracy and virtue stop him. He is stymied “by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness.” Ahab, by contrast, has no such qualms: Just a few pages earlier, he threatens Starbuck at point of musket, exclaiming, “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.”

Starbuck’s tragic end is the most heartbreaking of all, for he had the principles to stop Ahab but lacked the conviction:

Oh! my God! What is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant, – fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! Thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. … Is my journey’s end coming?

Demagoguery relies on the weakness of virtuous men, Melville says. And passion will always defeat the reasonable men who hope against hope that others are as reasonable as they. 

CONCLUSION

Ishmael is saved by the Rachel, the same ship Ahab rejected in its search for a missing boy. If Ahab had only turned aside from his own ambition to help the Rachel, perhaps he would have lived; perhaps Queequeg would have become a king, Starbuck would have returned to Mary, Pip would have returned to sanity. Perhaps everything would have been all right.

Instead, only Ishmael is left to tell the tale. But what a tale it is!

Ahab’s cry is the cry of all mankind at the suffering of life:

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. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!

And it is that cry that we remember and to which we resonate. The philosophizing of Ishmael seems shallow and irresolute compared with the iron will of Ahab. When Ishmael brushes off the risks of whaling as just one iteration of the “vast practical joke” that is the universe,43 we shrug. But when Ahab speaks, we stop and listen. He thunders down to us across the centuries. His cry is the same as the cry of all thinking men across all time.

Ahab’s cry is, as it turns out, Melville’s. 

To Melville, the struggle with that reality – the gap between God’s understanding and man’s – resulted in torment. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great writer to whom Melville dedicated Moby-Dick, wrote of the author:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, or be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

But the struggle is not mutually exclusive with religious belief. In fact, it is definitionally a part of religious belief. If we could understand God, we would be indistinct from Him; if we were totally separated from God, He would become irrelevant. The struggle with God is a struggle in which we acknowledge our relationship with Him. This idea is beautifully expressed in the Biblical episode in which Jacob wrestles with an angel. When it becomes clear that Jacob and the angel have wrestled to a standstill, Jacob demands a blessing. The angel responds by renaming Jacob Israel – meaning, “he who has struggled with God and with men and who has prevailed.”

In the struggle lies the faith. 

In the end, Ahab’s cry must be met the same way as Job’s: “Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto Me. Wilt thou even make void My judgment? Wilt thou condemn Me, that thou mayest be justified? … Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath; and look upon every one that is proud, and abase him.” God’s justice can never be understood. The pasteboard mask will always remain. We must learn to accept that reality and yet continue to struggle with it. That is what it means to be truly engaged in a world imbued with meaning.

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