Moby Dick

Upon first opening Melville’s Moby Dick, I was immediately struck by the etymology and quotation pages.  Although seemingly unimportant even after reading, once I began to delve into the pages of the actual novel, the pages began to gain more sense.  I was interested to see that almost all of the excerpts and much of the actual text refer to the whale as “leviathan”, rather than “whale” or any other descriptive word.  Interested, I did more research into the meaning and etymology of the word, and found that “leviathain” has a highly biblical background, stemming from the Hebrew word “levyatan” meaning twisted or coiled (ExperienceFestival.com).  Although it has many common uses, religiously the word has come to equal the ideas of Satan (mankind’s opposition to God) and more importantly, chaos: Psalm 74: 13-14 states

“It was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters; it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan, who left him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.” (OpenBible.info)

This general idea being that God defeated the Leviathan of the deep in order to create the earth according to his will (ExperienceFestival.com), I began to see references to attempted order in the text of Moby Dick itself; as if to combat the chaos of the whale itself, whalers create order where order does not inherently exist, both on land and by sea.

An interesting example of this forced order on land can be seen in the empty whalers’ graves in the New Bedford church:

 “Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among the flowers can say-here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these…. What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.” (Melville 41)

            As these men have been lost ambiguously to the sea, their bodies were never recovered and given a proper Christian burial.  The families of these men attempt at closure and healing with these empty stones to signify the death of their loved ones, although as Ishmael so solemnly observes, “…In [the widows’] unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh” (Melville 41).  Thus, although there is little to do to prevent or eventually cope with the loss of a loved one at sea, these people try their best to make order.

            Although many small steps are taken to assure the most physical order at sea (exhaustive cataloging, skill ranking above race, the knight/squire relationships, etc.), the First Mate, Starbuck, makes the first announced attempt at mental order.  Se he says, “‘I will have no man in my boat…who is not afraid of a whale’” (Melville 125).  What he is saying, Ishmael observes, is that “the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril” (125), while “an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward” (125).  No order can be made from thoughtlessly barging into the dangerous situations that the crew is sure to encounter-thus, although the peril is inevitable, Starbuck hopes that his men will take his advice to heart, and approach the whale with reverent and controlled fear rather than an overconfident, passionate war cry.  

One of the ship owners, Captain Peleg, balances Starbuck by saying “No time to think about death [when the ship is sinking].  Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands” (99).  So, between Starbuck and Peleg, a mental balance can be forged: calm reverence to avoid needless death, and quick thinking and bravery when death cannot be avoided.

 Works Cited:

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

“Leviathan.” Global Oneness. Web. 31 Jan. 2010. <http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Leviathan/id/515120>

“Whales: Related Bible Verses.” OpenBible.Info. Wed. 31 Jan. 2010. <http://www.openbible.info/topics/whales>

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