Moby Dick

The chapters in which we are introduced to Captain Ahab remind me of J.M. Barrie’s similar character, Captain Hook from Peter Pan (1904). Both are fearless, rough men of the sea, providing a source of treachery and deceit as the antagonists in their respective plots.  Hook’s loss of his hand to a crocodile parallels Ahab’s loss of his leg to a whale.  Both men choose inanimate objects in attempts to make themselves whole—a hook for a hand, and an ivory peg leg.  The destruction of these limbs compels the two captains to obtain revenge upon the monsters that caused physical as well as mental damage.

As a narrator, Ishmael speculates on the underlying psychological motives Ahab has for pursuing Moby-Dick:

…Ever since that fateful encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.  The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them… All evil to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. (Melville, 179)

Consumed by the humility and tangible loss of a part of himself, Ahab focuses all his mental powers and energy into exacting revenge upon the whale to regain a sense of his authority, not only over the sea, but over nature itself.  I can’t help but speculate that Ahab will meet a similar end as that of Captain Hook—he will ultimately be defeated by the creature that crippled him in the beginning.

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