Moby Dick

As has been made clear throughout the novel, the sea is all-powerful.  It can at once be a force of daunting deaths, and in another moment promoting a sense of serenity among the crewmembers on the Pequod.  Ishmael has many reflections and thoughts on the ocean, and also the way in which he understands the world, through being a shipmate on a whaling boat, by way of the ocean.  The power of it is most often overwhelming, and the intense insight it can offer a man is too much for many to handle (i.e. Pip).  But in Chapter 111, Ishmael has a more peaceful moment while experiencing the dreaminess of the Pacific’s “tide-beating heart of the earth” (Melville 465).

…for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling ways but made so by their restlessness” (465).

In this most serene moment, Ishmael understands the ocean as a sort of heaven for him.  But he then remarks that someone such as Ahab won’t ever have these feelings of calmness towards the sea.  Captain Ahab will never be “lifted by those eternal swells” of the sea, as he has accepted his fate, and is only able to focus on the task he feels has been set for him, to kill Moby Dick.  Ishmael also finds it somewhat difficult to imagine that “the hated white whale must even then be swimming” in this sea he himself feels so at peace with.  We are often reminded of all that the sea keeps in hiding, and while Moby Dick is one evil among many that lurk below, Melville also uses this chapter to remind us those hidden aspects contain the “soul” of the sea.  And in relating the soul of the sea to the soul of man, it is clear that both hide certain “gently awful stirrings” (465).

In chapters such as this one, Melville is contrasting the concentrated drama of the novel’s looming end with scenes of tranquility and thoughtfulness.  Pitting the two against each other can be seen as a reflection on the act of whaling itself, as it’s made up of moments of high intensity, interspersed with many lulls of waiting and watching.  Also, in showing that Ahab has no experience of these lulls, the reader is alerted to the drama he himself is constructing.  In not ever feeling a sense of calm, he is allowing Moby Dick to consume him, and thus forcing his fate to become a reality.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York, NY: Signet Classic, 1998.

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