Moby Dick

In the opening paragraph of the Moby Dick, Ishmael’s cherished relationship with the ocean is established. In the mysterious, and ominous introduction, our narrator invokes the sea as a healer of land-induced woes. When Ishmael feels grimness in his soul he retreats to the sea for solace and rejuvenation. The “watery part of the world” offers Ishmael a “substitute for pistol and ball” (Melville 1). The free-flowing movement of the sea seems to lull our narrator back into a more peaceful and quiet frame of mind.

His suicidal thoughts (or potentially murderous tendencies) are not attributed to anything specific, so it’s difficult to say if Ishmael believes the physical land to be at the root of his darkness, or whether he just finds the sea to be a retreat from his own personal demons (not in relation to the land itself). Regardless, his ocean solution is not commonplace, yet Ishmael speaks as if it is a very normal way to deal with depression. In fact, so normal that he feels “almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean…” (1).

Melville’s attempts to normalize the lifestyle of taking “to the ship” functions to alert readers to the important role the sea is going to play in the rest of the novel. In order for readers to access the tale they must adopt those feelings as well. Ishmael is looking to get out on the open water “as soon as [he] can,” but it’s not until the 22nd chapter that Melville finally takes us aboard the ship. This extended time spent on land offers readers a foundation for the inevitable ensuing contrast of life at sea.

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

“…but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is his absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the invisible images of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.”

Herman Melville lived and wrote in the midst of the American transcendentalist movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau wrote and theorized about a pantheistic philosophy which mysticized the natural world. They believed that prolonged, isolated contemplation of nature could lead to an enlightened self-fulfillment. Transcendentalism permeates Moby Dick. Ishmael speaks constantly to the reverie of the sea, which overwhelms the senses and defeats the mast-head lookouts of the Pequod. As Thoreau sought out isolation in his cabin and the solace of nature to forget the cares of the world, so too does Ishmael remedy his misanthropic side with refuge in the profound isolation of the sea.

While nature can be a place of enlightenment, it also threatens those who would try to understand or to conquer it. Death threatens the mast-head philosophers if they gaze too deeply into nature’s secrets, as they can plunge to the deck below if they lose their grip in their reverie. Moby Dick himself, the most obvious personification of nature in the novel, destroys all those who would challenge him and his domain. The same majestic qualities of nature that invoke awe also strike terror into the whalers and reader alike. In this respect, it is difficult to separate Melville’s religious symbolism from his depictions of nature. One of the most powerful descriptions of nature comes from Father Mapple’s sermon on Jonah and the whale. God, the tempest, and the whale are all one and the same, predestined to act according to God’s plan. Ahab’s fatal flaw is, as in many a Greek tragedy, hubris. He makes the mistake of believing that he can strike back against the natural, divine forces which took away his leg. His arrogance leads to his inevitable, terrible downfall.

As I was reading the beginning parts of Moby Dick, one of the things that occurred to me was the utter reliance that these sailing towns seem to have on the sea. These ports and islands rely on the ocean for their economy, food, light and most everything else they need. This then slips into everything that they do. While in New Bedford we can see this through the decorations at the inn and even the sermon given at the church. Most of the people who visit this church are also effected by the sea. They are all sailors or family members of sailors. As much as we see this connection to the sea in New Bedford, I believe that the chapter that describes Nantucket is the best example of how Melville sets up a relationship between Whaling towns and their reliance on the environment that the ocean presents them with.

The first thing that we learn about Nantucket is that it is completely covered in sand. This poses a problem for people who live here in terms of making a living. If you live in a place where grass and trees are so scarce that people “plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time,” you can not expect to farm as a way of life. According to the Native American tale that Ishmeal tells us, the people who first lived on this island began by digging for clams and then soon started fishing. They worked their way up until they finally began hunting whales.

This kind of adaptation to your surroundings is something that gets talked about a lot in American history. The way that people from another country adapted to the new conditions around them is one way of studying regional differences within the United States. This can be seen especially in the ways that we study the West and the adaption of living in an arid climate. This adaptation and rugged determination to live in places that may not be easy to live has been pointed at as a source of the “American character” in the West. Some say that this kind of adaption however could be going too far in some cases. In the West we can see problems arising now in water supplies. As we now know in the case of whaling, people had created an industry that was eventually extremely distructive to the living environment in the ocean. By creating a way for the human population to live, there was an Environmental cost.

I am curious to see as the book goes on how Melville adresses this problem. You can clearly see that he is aware that this connection to the environment exists very strongly between sailing towns and the sea. However, I do not think that I have see a strong opinion emerge just yet.

This group’s postings will be about how particular passages in the novel pertain to issues of the natural world, or how they might allude to or suggest Melville’s (or Ishmael’s) views on the environment.