Moby Dick

“…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.

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