Moby Dick

For my final blog post on Moby Dick, I am going to forsake my category and write, instead, about something I found very touching towards the end of the novel, that being Ahab’s relationship with Starbuck as their fate draws near. In Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” Ahab seems to pour out his soul to his first mate:

…Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! – lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in thine eye!

In this passage, Ahab admits his humanity. He remembers his own family, and owns (in preferring the gaze of man to that of God or that towards sea or sky) that he, perhaps, regrets his life away from them and the “normal” human existence that he could have lead. Yet after this touching speech, Ahab proves he is set on his destiny by pursuing Moby Dick. He has Starbuck stay behind in the fateful chase, preserving what Ahab deems true humanity- a man with a family whom he loves, with attachment to the land. Ahab seems to equate land with humanity, here, pronouncing Starbuck’s human eye as the “magic glass” with the exclamations, “By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone!” He sets the sea and sky as separate from humanity in putting the gaze into the human eye as one on a different level from that into the sea or sky. Ahab, after all his years at sea, has become inhuman in losing his connection with the land. We may view his fixed idea of his destiny as one pre-ordained by God, in line with Melville’s religious awareness, or we can say that Ahab made his own fate by choosing a life that precluded the sort of destiny that includes dying peacefully by the fireside, wrapped in blankets while your wife and child murmur their last farewells. Ahab’s destiny was self-made, and he acknowledges this in his speech to Starbuck.
Ahab enforces this realization by having Starbuck stay behind. Ahab sees Starbuck’s “far away home” in his eye and knows that Starbuck has not yet sealed his own fate. Starbuck remains a member of humanity, a person of the land who sojourns at sea and no more, which Ahab used to be before he devoted his entire life to the non-human realms, that of sea and sky and God and “destiny.” Ahab’s tenderness towards the first mate comes out, then, as he reminds Ahab as his own lost humanity.
This brings us back to the beginning of the novel, in which Ishmael talks of how he has to go out to sea every now and then “as a substitute for pistol and ball.” In saying that he avoids suicide by going to sea, Ishmael inherently equates the two (“With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship”). In other words, Ishmael gets tired of being a human, so enters a realm in which he does not have to be. Death, certainly, is such a realm, but Melville frames the sea as one, as well. It is thus fitting that Ishmael sets out on his watery journey with Queequeg, a man who would challenge any American’s views of humanity in the 19th century.
The idea of a seaward voyage as the end of one’s humanity can be seen in Ahab’s final farewell to Starbuck in Chapter 135, “The Chase – Third Day.” Ahab says, “’Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!’” which instantly brings to mind the image of Ahab himself, boarding a ship and ever afterwards missing from humanity. He understands in retrospect why the course of his life played out as it did. By his speech in “The Symphony,” we see that Ahab questions his life decisions:

…Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase?…how the richer or better is Ahab now?

Ishmael, on he other hand, understands his exact reasons for boarding the Pequod before he does it. He does it to escape life so that he can be better equipped to return to it. Ahab up and left his life on shore and got too caught up in the world of whaling to properly think about his priorities. He acquires a “destiny” by accident, by carelessness. Ishmael thinks (like it’s his job), and he avoids a watery death.

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