101 pages • 3 hours read
Moby Dick
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Themes
The Supremacy of Nature
Moby Dick is at the heart of the Romantic literary tradition in which the imagination of the individual genius is measured against the incredible force and majesty of nature. This tradition can be gentle and harmonious, as when a poet studies the patterns and cycles of the natural world and finds those patterns and cycles preexisting in themself. It can also evoke fury and horror, as when the modern human seeks to impose themself upon nature, taming it conform to ether their practical or emotional needs.
A French idiom to describe a difficult passion or pointless pursuit a “bête noire,” or black beast. Thanks to the influence of Melville, in English we invert the phrase cliché, calling such passion a “white whale.” As with all cliché, this usage obscures the more difficult and specific meaning of Melville’s text. Nature, with its implacable but unpredictable laws, will destroy the individual soul that matches itself to it, even as it inevitably erodes the individual body. The white whale is not a problem to be solved; it is a fact with which one comes to terms, or else dies a death in spirit.
This problem is best exemplified by Ahab’s relationship to his mortality, and therefore to the loss of his vitality. His leg comes up often in this regard. More than once, his splintered leg breaks and pierces him near the groin, threatening to leave him impotent; that it hobbles his walking, then, is only one of its salient features. At the same time, Ahab often refers mournfully to his grey hairs and to forty years in the whaling business which has left him unable to emotionally function on land. Because he cannot blame the inevitability of death, which everyone experiences, he projects blame onto the whale Moby Dick, an animal that may be fearsome and aggressive but cannot possibly care about Ahab one way or the other. Yet, the more senseless Ahab’s struggle becomes, the more passionate. Unwilling or unable to meet the supremacy of nature with grace, Ahab loses himself completely.
Individual Versus Collective Responsibility
Of the many forces at war in Moby Dick, the most prominent and complicated of these battles is the war between the individual and the collective, between what any individual human being owes themself and what they owe to the rest of humanity.
Before Ishmael sets out on his voyage, he witnesses Father Mapple tell the story of Jonah, focusing on his misery and alienation as he travels the world attempting to flee God and himself. This sermon comes to an unexpected conclusion. When Jonah reconciles himself to God while in the belly of the whale, the preacher treats it as a tremendous self-realization, a discovery of reconciliation with oneself. “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,” concludes Father Mapple (54). Mapple’s message implies that God and the self are the same entity. This is a tremendous elevation for the self, and a dramatic demotion for the traditional view of God. For Ishmael, the individual reigns supreme, and this is a declaration Ishmael himself will make time and again throughout Moby Dick, citing his own authority above that of learned men with no practical experience.
The dark side of extreme independence is seen within Ahab, whose monomaniacal passion to avenge his wound and the life he spent at sea destroys everyone and everything around him. His darkness is self-centered and only possible because it is left unchecked by a sense of responsibility to the collective.
“Hypos”
“And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness,” Ishmael says, as he daydreams at the mast-head instead of looking for whales (172). In the nineteenth century, before depression was named and pathologized, a person was said to “have their hypos up.” The word may have its origins in a broad definition of “hypochondria,” meaning, at one time, any illness of the mind (or of the heart, as “hypochondria” means “under the sternum”). Ishmael’s depression leads him to the sea, where we can see him healing from the mental ennui he experienced on land. He befriends Queequeg, in whose difference he finds escape from his own personality and true friendship. He finds a place on the ship, acting as Queequeg’s oarsman and second man. He finds extraordinary communion with his fellows in the chapter “A Squeeze of the Hand.” He is not especially good at his job, but his inefficiencies go unnoticed. The Pequod is a boon to Ishmael’s depression.
Not so Ahab, for whom the Pequod is a barrier to restorative healing. His every move is watched and depended on by his crew, and even his absences yell out like a bullhorn. In contrast to Ishmael, his escape from himself only deepens his pathology. Melville suggests that it is emotional closeness to one’s fellow human being that heals and restores the soul, and Ahab’s pointless pursuit stands in the way of this closeness.
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By Herman Melville
