Moby Dick

Person-labeling is dangerous. Its seduction, however, in making easy categorizations of people so we can wrap our heads around them, make them easier to remember, has made it a fixture in human social life. How many times have you been asked, or asked, after brief introduction to a fellow Vassar student, the noxious, oppressive “what’s your major?” or “where do you live?” Certainly I have done so, if only as a feeble attempt to advance conversation rather than any genuine interest in, say, where someone lives. But then again, who should care? Perhaps I should grant you more benefit of the doubt, but I nonetheless maintain that it is largely a substanceless question, at least partially designed to fit that given person into your mental person-labeling chart. Worse is the “major” question. It allows you to “know” something about that person: “Oh, she’s a philosophy major. She likes big questions and, unless she goes to law school, may flounder in the professional circuit, having to deal with real, practical questions with which her knowledge of abstract concepts cannot help her.”  However right or wrong those immediate conclusions are is beside the point, and I hope you get mine.

So when Professor Friedman commented that Melville takes on his society’s propensity for qualitative categorization based on physical attributes (see any of Ishmael’s initial descriptions of anyone), I was eager to find a really good example in which a given character does not conform to his stereotype. My favorite one thus far  is from the beginning of Chapter 108, “Queequeg in His Coffin,” when Ishmael describes Queequeg as very sick:

“But as all else in him thinned, and his cheekbones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of luster; and mildly but deeply looked at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die.” (Signet, 460)

Queequeg might be labeled as a pagan, a tattooed freak, an incoherent, babbling brute, and a cannibal, all reinforcing his stereotype as a savage, but his penetrating, warm, affirming eyes transcend simple categorization, declaring his individuality. He is not merely a savage; he is Queequeg!

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