Moby Dick

…any man unaccustomed to such sights…would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

The sharks which accompany the whalers on their hunts and in the butchering of their whales embody the mystical, savage energy Melville ascribes to the sea.  The image of sharks in the sea as maggots in cheese is a particularly revealing metaphor.  When Melville was writing, many people believed that maggots and other small vermin arose to life spontaneously from inanimate matter.  “Spontaneous generation” was conclusively disproved later in the century, but in the beginning of the 19th century it didn’t seem so obvious.  Life was thought to arise in all sorts of places as a more animated form of the matter from which it came.  In this sense, the sharks that infest the waters around the Pequod are literally the physical incarnation of the sea’s uncontrollable, irrational force.  The water teems with its deadly progeny, both incredible and terrifying to behold.

They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound…A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed.  Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharkss almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.

The sharks do not possess any sense of self-preservation beyond their all-consuming desire to eat, which drives them even to eat themselves when wounded by the whaling spades.  In this respect, their manic drive mirrors that of Ahab.  To the sharks, the whaling spades might as well be a force of nature, unfathomable and unassailable.  Ahab was also wounded by a force of nature, but unlike the sharks, he has the ability to envision the being which “demasted” him.  His thirst for revenge is not unlike the sharks’ thirst for blood which causes them to gorge on their own entrails, and in his quest he eventually consumes himself.  Taking the Ahab-as-shark metaphor to the next level, Ahab might be interpreted as already dead.  Without any reason or understanding, he, like the dead shark, can only snap out compulsively at whatever draws near him.  Unfortunately for the crew of the Pequod, their fates are inextricably linked to that of their mad captain.

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