Moby Dick

We have discussed at length, both in class and online, Ahab’s insanity, manifested in his relentless, vengeful, suicidal mission to slay Moby Dick.  When he finally gives insight into his mind, Ahab admits that his mission is foolhardy, but he says that he feels drawn by some other power to perform it:

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; 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; 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? (Melville 592)

While his insanity was a force to be reckoned with on board, and indeed the men must bow to it, it is the strange structure of power aboard the Pequod that allows him to carry out his mission.  With the feudal system, partially ordered by strength and skill levels, Ahab’s “reign”, as one might call it, remains unquestioned by the men aboard, no matter how crazy he is.  Only Starbuck seems to question it, but Ahab is able to refuse him by explaining that he is powered by the divine.  Because all men aboard a whaling ship have given themselves over to one form of madness or another (as I/we have discussed), this reason allows Ahab sustain order aboard the ship with the few who dissent.

In Melville’s Bartleby, however, this same power is not held by the nameless narrator.  Like Ahab, he begins to feel compelled by the divine (as he confides to the reader):

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. (Melville 10)

But although he feels this way, the sane (or perhaps merely pragmatically secular) reality of life on land forces him to abandon this feeling:

At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much… I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and for ever rid me of this intolerable incubus. (10)

The need to sustain a good image among his peers forces the narrator to take the action he otherwise wouldn’t have, which would be the equivalent of Ahab returning home, and giving up Moby Dick.  But that is the main point: the narrator has peers.  Although he is the “captain” of his office so to speak, he is not separated from other “captains” by a large ocean, upon which each leader has absolute power.  He is confined to land, and therefore his ideas that verge on madness are reined in by societal constraints, whereas Ahab remains sure in his convictions, leading his crew onward, towards doom.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Northwestern University Press, 1988. Reissued 2003. Print.

Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street. Enotes, 2010. <http://www.enotes.com/bartleby-scrivener-text>

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