Moby Dick

In terms of environment and nature, I don’t remember exactly

It is not really opinion, but closer to fact that Ahab, the captain of the doomed ship the Pequod, was an unhealthily obsessed man. He turned his feelings of imasculinity, his pain, his insanity, on a reasonless creature that caused him the loss of his leg when he was viciously hunting it down.

We discussed in class how Ahab’s hunt for Moby dick was a way for him to subdue nature, to take control of the world in such a way to be considered hubris. I can somewhat see this mode of thinking in how the final confrontation with Moby Dick played out. It’s easy to see this ending in two different ways. An epic conflict drawing to a close, a struggle, the ship taken down by a whirlpool of monumentous proportions as the captain shouts final words of unending hate at the great leviathon that caused his destruction. That really sounds the stuff of epic poetry in itself, or at least Pirates of the Caribbean. On the other hand though, it was incredibly senseless. Maybe a hundred sailors’ lives cut down short for a madman’s obsession of a creature that couldn’t feel hate, or vengeance. I can’t decide which way Melville intended it though, one way or both.

But to my original point, does nature in this book retaliate in such a way to punish Ahab who as a man saught to assert his dominion and vengeance over danger? I could definitely see it that way.

“…not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See!Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is toug, though that madly seekest him.” (546)

It is this line that for me that truly held nature blameless in this struggle. It wasn’t a novel about a war between nature and Ahab, but a war between a man and himself, and what he couldn’t let go.

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