Moby Dick

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.  He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin.  In Noah’s flood, he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.

In this passage, Melville expresses the belief, common at the time, that there was no way humans could really affect the earth in a substantial way.  In the fledgling United States, the European colonizers were just beginning to scratch the surface of the land’s enormous natural resources.  To white “settlers,” the frontier seemed like it would stretch forever to the West.  Even in the East, which had been colonized for two hundred years, there remained large areas still populated by indigenous peoples with the intrusion of only a few white homesteaders.  The late-20th century anxieties about habitat destruction, environmental contamination, and and eventually global warming were far away.  “The whale” metaphorically stands in for all of nature, and Melville places him above both human religion and government.  He swam over the various seats of human power and was impervious to God’s flood, so the whale as a species could never be brought low by human whalers.  In the face of such permanence, humans are compared to the rats of the Netherlands, powerless to stop their destruction at the hands of an angry God or Nature.  While this sentiment seems quaint in our own time of real environmental devastation by human hands, it is very much a product of a moment when earth’s bounty seemed limitless.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

The final sentence of the book similarly comments on nature’s indifference to mankind, although this time in a much more reflexive, existential fashion.   All the sound and fury of the chase and climactic battle between Ahab and Moby Dick has subsided.  The Pequod and its crew are quickly sinking to the bottom of the ocean, but from the surface of the sea all seems calm.  Ahab left a huge vortex in his wake that sucked down all the crew but one, but after they are gone the “shroud of the sea” covers them all, never to be seen again.  As before, Melville speaks to his belief in the essentially untouchable character of nature.  “The sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” and Melville believes it will roll on, unaltered, for five thousand more.  In comparison to such a powerful, faceless, inevitability, the challenges and triumphs of humanity seem very small and inconsequential.  In the face of a conflated God and Nature, the drama of Ahab, the Pequod, and Moby Dick are dismissed as minor irrelevancies.

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