Moby Dick

In Chapter 126, “The Life-Buoy,” Starbuck and the rest of the gang are confronted with the idea of making Queequeg’s former coffin into a substitution life-buoy for the one previously lost from the Pequod. In Starbuck’s practical yet nervous fashion, he instructs the ship’s carpenter to carry out this oddly morbid task, giving him step-by-step instructions on how to do the job until the carpenter shoos him away. After Starbuck takes his leave, the carpenter goes on to complain about his new assignment:

Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he wont put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don’t like this cobbling sort of business—I don’t like it at all; it’s undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something regularly begins at the beginning and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end…

I realize this above passage is a lot to deal with at once, but the carpenter’s main complaint is that the work he is told to complete, i.e. turning his previously made coffin into a life-buoy, is an “undignified” sort of work, the kind meant for someone of a lower station than his. The carpenter seems to think this because he is not given a new job in constructing this life-buoy, but is rather “tinkering” with something already made, even though it was done so by him. Thus, what mostly disturbs the carpenter is the idea of a never-ending job. (I’ll return to this point shortly.) His grumblings about such work lowering his station serve as a mere distraction for the deeper bother that pervades the situation of turning a vehicle of death into a vehicle of life, a bother that Starbuck transfers onto him with his nervous fussing about how the carpenter is to complete this task. We can see by their dialogue that Starbuck clearly annoys the carpenter with this fussing, and this annoyance prompts the carpenter’s soliloquy more than the lowly stigma of the job does. The situation is akin to when your mother makes you do the dishes against your will, and you mumble about how the dish soap smells bad when you really find the scent quite appealing but cannot simply acquiesce to the disagreeable task.
However, the carpenter does seem particularly caught up in the idea of the “never-ending job,” to which I previously alluded. He makes something that goes unused, and now he must make it to serve an entirely opposite purpose. The idea of this would frustrate anyone, but one would think the carpenter an exception to this rule in a circumstance in which he has the power to, essentially, convert death into life. Yet the carpenter exhibits complete indifference to such concepts, nonchalantly stating that Queequeg, the ungrateful man, would not even “put his head into” the coffin the carpenter had crafted for him! Instead, the carpenter favors the importance of a set of opposites different from that of life and death; he focuses on the idea of new versus worked-over, and “mathematical” versus muddled. As for the former in regards to labor, the carpenter’s favoring of the new alludes to a preference for trade work over labor in the fields and other types of maintenance work. If you work in a craft, you renew your work every day, creating a new table, for instance, each time one is commissioned. If you toil in the fields or mend people’s dysfunctional items, performing labor akin to those of slaves and the lower classes, your work is never fresh- you are always toiling from the same, old cloth, so to speak. This exposes the way society, in Melville’s time, prompted people to view different types of work as more or less “dignified.”
On the topic of the carpenter favoring the “mathematical” over the muddled, this could relate to the idea of skilled versus unskilled labor. However, I think this has something to say about fate, destiny- people’s lives. Though the carpenter refers directly to his job of converting the coffin, he may also be saying that people go about changing their minds in regards to their destinies. Queequeg cannot just commission a coffin one day and suggest it be turned into a life-buoy the next! He has no respect for fate, in behaving so. The carpenter thinks things (humans, in particular) should have finite lives (of which they are not completely in control), consisting of clear beginnings and expiration dates. This, too, relates back to his preference for trade work over cyclical labor in the fields or the mending of broken goods. Fixing the broken or changing an object’s use is going against the idea of destiny. In turning the coffin into a life-buoy, the carpenter is wary of messing with fate.

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