Moby Dick

The topic that was randomly assigned to me was Environment and nature, which for the sake of this blog and a few others I will assume to be vague. Let’s just say I’m examining the social environment in Ahab’s mind, and his thirst for destroying a whale, which is a part of nature.  When reading Moby Dick, and Ahab’s insane reason for hunting a whale, i couldn’t help but think of a masculinity issue being at play. The descriptions of past Ahab’s character as a good captain would’ve endeared me to him before he was shown if I hadn’t already heard how crazy he was in pop culture. However eventually  we come to see him as a man devoid of really any other characteristics besides his vengeance for a beast without reason. In class and in other circles, Ahab’s injury is seen as one that robbed him masculinity. He was essentially “de-masted”. Reading this book, I couldn’t help but agree. Not only did the accident rob him of really any functioning position beside captain, but in is thirst for vengeance their seems to be a lack of passion for anything else in the whaling ship that does not discern Moby. As the crew hunts down a non-Moby whale in the graphically memorable “Stubbs kills a whale” chapter, Ahab is completely separate from this, mostly disappointed. This is seen in clear contrast to the rest of the crew when the omnipresent narrator takes over and we get to see his actions as coldly calculating. I could talk in length about his death in this subject; him jumping off with spear in hand in a final effort to take down Moby, but I really feel anyone could tell where I would go with this… My point is really that Ahab’s first fateful encounter of the whale robbed him most of all any other base emotion beside an obsessive vengeance. In hunting down Moby I think, and I know I’m reaching, that Ahab was either trying to take it back or express the only form of masculinity he had left. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”

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