Moby Dick

We have discussed at length, both in class and online, Ahab’s insanity, manifested in his relentless, vengeful, suicidal mission to slay Moby Dick.  When he finally gives insight into his mind, Ahab admits that his mission is foolhardy, but he says that he feels drawn by some other power to perform it:

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? (Melville 592)

While his insanity was a force to be reckoned with on board, and indeed the men must bow to it, it is the strange structure of power aboard the Pequod that allows him to carry out his mission.  With the feudal system, partially ordered by strength and skill levels, Ahab’s “reign”, as one might call it, remains unquestioned by the men aboard, no matter how crazy he is.  Only Starbuck seems to question it, but Ahab is able to refuse him by explaining that he is powered by the divine.  Because all men aboard a whaling ship have given themselves over to one form of madness or another (as I/we have discussed), this reason allows Ahab sustain order aboard the ship with the few who dissent.

In Melville’s Bartleby, however, this same power is not held by the nameless narrator.  Like Ahab, he begins to feel compelled by the divine (as he confides to the reader):

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom. (Melville 10)

But although he feels this way, the sane (or perhaps merely pragmatically secular) reality of life on land forces him to abandon this feeling:

At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much… I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and for ever rid me of this intolerable incubus. (10)

The need to sustain a good image among his peers forces the narrator to take the action he otherwise wouldn’t have, which would be the equivalent of Ahab returning home, and giving up Moby Dick.  But that is the main point: the narrator has peers.  Although he is the “captain” of his office so to speak, he is not separated from other “captains” by a large ocean, upon which each leader has absolute power.  He is confined to land, and therefore his ideas that verge on madness are reined in by societal constraints, whereas Ahab remains sure in his convictions, leading his crew onward, towards doom.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Northwestern University Press, 1988. Reissued 2003. Print.

Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street. Enotes, 2010. <http://www.enotes.com/bartleby-scrivener-text>

I remember reading another student’s post on Chapter 132 (“The Symphony”) and how this chapter describes the environment and nature as being gendered. I found that post intriguing and wanted to explore those themes further. In this chapter, t is clear that Melville describes the sky as being feminine and the sea masculine:

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; anf these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea (478).

My question is: why does Melville ascribe these qualities to nature? What is the intent behind making the sea and sky appear to be in some type of opposition to each other (at least sexually)? This is further complicated when Melville writes that “though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them” (478). So although the sea and sky are different genders, they are still viewed as essentially one entity (nature). In this case, it seems that nature is described this way to provide a direct contrast with Ahab, who is determined to destroy Moby Dick (clearly a part of nature). Ahab is described as being “[t]ied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; […] lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven” (478). Here, Ahab is depicted as a violent, disgusting being who appears ready to battle (or perhaps plunder and rape) nature. What does it mean that Ahab is going to attempt to fight against the “masculine” sea, instead of the “feminine” air? Does this make it seem more like an actual battle, instead of some sexualized conquest? Of course, Ahab is also destroyed by the sea, which makes me wonder if Melville is commenting on how many masculine beings can actually exist together on Earth. It seems that nature is its own husband and wife (so to speak), which also happen to be essentially one and the same with contrasts “only in shades and shadows.” Although Ishmael laments how oblivious nature was “of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe,” it later seems that nature was (in some way) quite aware of Ahab and prepared to handle him (478).

I found this chapter fascinating and am still confused about what to make of it. It seems like one could view the “symphony” as the interplay between all the facets of nature, which create something beautiful (perhaps even artful or musical). And in another way, it appears that Ahab is merely a character in this play, someone who has to follow through with the show even though it leads to his eventual destruction. Even he has a part in this symphony, although at times he appears to be in direct opposition to it.

In Chapter 128, “The Pequod Meets the Rachel,” the reader experiences one of Captain Ahab’s cruelest and most selfish moments in the novel. As he slows his speed to meet the other ship, Ahab unhesitatingly calls out in question of the white whale. He sickly yet predictably exhibits maniacal joy upon hearing from the captain that Moby Dick has indeed been sighted.

Next, this other captain boards The Pequod to petition his urgent cause to Ahab. One of his ship’s whale-boats has recently been lost, and on it is his twelve year-old son; thus, he pleads to Ahab to have the two ships join forces in pursuit of his son and other lost crewmates and agrees to pay entirely for the forty-eight hour search to make up for The Pequod’s lost profits during what Stubb describes as “the height of the whaling season” (469). This captain attempts to present his case in such a way that Ahab must relate to it and agree wholeheartedly to the request. In fact, the conversation between the two – if we can even call it a conversation, as Ahab does not utter a word until the very end – is like a man-to-man kind of talk. The captain tries to appeal foremost to Ahab’s sense of paternal affection and protectiveness: for instance, he implores, “‘Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab – though but a child, and nestling safely at home – a child of your old age too – Yes, yes, you relent; I see it – run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards’” (470).

However, there are warning signs to us readers that Ahab is not about to acquiesce – particularly in terms of his body language and facial expression. All while the captain of the Rachel expresses the graveness and desperation of his dilemma, Ahab is described as listening “icily” and standing “like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own” (470). This prepares us for his negative response: Ahab abruptly and curtly cuts off the fellow captain, just as he is assuming that The Pequod will join the hunt for his loved one, and rejects his wish. Ahab claims that his ship cannot afford to lose any time and that it must carry on its way at full speed; subsequently, “hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit” (470). Ahab’s feelings have hardened so much so that he does not feel the homosocial bonds that should connect to him to other men and other sailors. He has abandoned the empathy and compassion of a parent. The only hunt Ahab is interested in is his personal one for vengeance. As I read this, I couldn’t help but tear up – Ahab is so sick and twisted, he cannot pause his chase for two days to help another man find his kin? Even Ahab’s crew, many of whom live in fear of their absolutist monarch, expect to take the more sympathetic and less selfish course, as Stubb remarks, “‘His son!…oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat and watch-what says Ahab? We must save that boy’” (469).

Besides revealing more about Ahab as a character, this chapter lends the reader some interesting historical information about common whaling practices in the nineteenth century. The narrator informs us that, although not true in this case with the Rachel, a Nantucket captain typically sent his son away for three to four years to sail aboard another ship besides his own. This was done out of fear of the father losing his neutrality, which could negatively affect the success of the whaling expedition and the development of the young boy. Melville writes, “the first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern” (470). As a boy growing up to be a whaler in Nantucket, you better have been prepared to grow up fast! No holding your father’s hand. And perhaps the captain of the Rachel has to learn a harsh lesson for going against the grain and trying to simultaneously play the roles of captain and father. Unfortunately for him in Chapter 128, he encounters the wrong ship run by the wrong man. Most likely his son will be lost forever to the mother sea…

In the chapters leading up to the end of the novel, the sense of impending doom is heightened. We understand that the Pequod and its inhabitants are inextricably entangled in fate, what will be will be. The harpooners play a special part in this sequence, their outside position as other gives them a unique perspective of the Pequod and its fate. This ability to somehow see, sense, or divine what is predestined is certainly present in Fedallah’s prophecy, but there are a handful of other instances that represent this same wonder.

The transformation of Queequeg’s coffin into the means of salvation for Ishmael, thus in many ways living up to Queequeg’s initial oath to Ishmael signals that Queequeg has some special connection or access to the current of fate that others are not privy to. His seeming decision not to die of the illness is another indicator of his singular position as a “savage” to maybe play a more active or at least more aware role in his course of life. In chapter 126, The Life Buoy,

the watch…was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly…that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooners remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman – the oldest mariner of all – declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea” (463)

Members of the crew have different responses to the uncanny cries, but the Harpooners are not frightened. This may be because they are aware that it is seals – the answer Ahab gives to put everyone at rest. I however would argue that it is because the uncivilized/non-christian Daggoo, Queequeg and Tashtego are much more comfortable with the realm of the supernatural. They are not afraid that things exist that we cannot understand or explain as they have not been socialized to accept the scientific model of the world. Rather they are able to see into what is actually at work with a different viewpoint, one not clouded by irrational fear of the irrational. This quiet power recommends them to Ahab and this is why Ishmael later remarks that they are the only men on board who Ahab still seems to trust. He takes their power as outsiders as a marker of a clear knowledge of the future, rather than a sense of the nature of fate, and wrongly interprets that because they are “on his side” that he is in the right and will win out. Ahab makes the same mistake of projecting his own delusions of divinity and destiny onto Fedallah’s prediction.

Fedallah’s prediction comes out right; he really has a mystic connection to time’s predestination, but Ahab mistakes it as an assurance that he will survive the journey. Instead it is a prediction of the destruction of not just Ahab, but the ship and all the crew but Ishmael. Whether Fedallah is aware of the actual end or not is unclear, but seems possible, that he is facing the fate that he understands must and will come to be. Ahab thinks that the two hearses cannot possibly be encountered on the voyage. He then comes to see that one is Moby Dick and the other the Pequod. In this revelation he sees how deluded he has been, how deeply he has believed in his own fabrication. Ahab and the Harpooneers go down alike in a great climax of fate-action, laid equal in their watery grave. The sea washes over everything.

In Melville’s short story Benito Cereno there appear many of the same themes and dynamics as we observed in Moby Dick. Here, however, we do see women aboard: the “Negresses”  (as Melville calls them) or female slaves upon the San Dominick. In one particular moment, our antagonist Captain Delano sees one of these women asleep with her child crawling by her:

His attention had been drawn to a slumbering Negress…lying… like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from the deck…its hands, like two paws, clambering upon her…This incident prompted him to remark the other Negresses more particularly than before… Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves.

Both the women and her child are directly compared to animals. It is true that Babo is also described as being a kind of faithful dog to the Spanish captain, but his physical proximity to this white man and his sense of purpose place him in a different rhelm than the black women. This is the common idea of how race creates the notion of the “other”, but even this label has its own divisions; a women of a “lesser” race is more of an “other” than a man of the same.

This idea is further suggested by the relationship between Don Benito and Babo. In Moby Dick, we discussed the homo-social and homo-erotic elements aboard the Pequod, but I wrote a post on how these undertones surfaced due to the natural sexuality of all human beings coupled with the absence of women. Here women are present, yet Babo’s affection is directed not towards them but towards his male “master” and captain. Babo supports Don Benito in many ways including physically:

so that, the better to support him, the servant, placing his master’s hand on his naked shoulder, and gently holding it there, formed himself into a sort of crutch.

This image is somehow sensual and suggestive. This element is present as well in the chapter In the Cuddy, when Babo shaves Don Benito:

the servant commenced operations by throwing back his master’s collar and loosening his cravat.

And when Babo accidentally draws blood, he and Don Benito remain afterwards on good terms causing Captain Delano to consider it all “a sort of love-quarrel”. It seems then that Melville continues in this story on his social commentary or at least questioning of masculinity, sexuality and race. But though we may,as we did in Moby Dick, be struck by the apparently anti-racist push of Melville by reading such bold moments as the following:

“Faithful fellow!” cried Captain Delano. “Don Benito, I envy you such a friend; slave I cannot call him.”

This angelic, bumbling slave is in the end a dangerous, violent and manipulative being. Thus, as always, we are left questioning (perhaps along with Melville) what the message really is and what aspects are the result of prejudices and uncertainties.

Melville puts Ahab in an interesting situation.  He portrays the story with elements of an epic poem and casts Ahab as the hero.  Homer and Ahab may both be plagued by hubris, but in the Odyssey for instance, Homer mainly wants to get home.  Ahab, on the other hand, is completely obsessed with a dangerous errand – the destruction of his arch-rival Moby Dick.  Melville foreshadows many times the dangers inherent in such a goal and with each day of the chase, the reader discovers more and more the futility of Ahab’s actions.  The white whale toys with the Pequod’s crew while Ahab rallies support, effectively condemns his shipmates, and attacks with incredible fervor and “bravery.”

But is Ahab actually brave?  Bravery definitely involves an element of foolhardiness, which Ahab has, but it should also involve agency.  No one is denying Ahab’s intelligence and command but his obsession leads me to believe his actions are out of his control, at least on a subconscious level.  Ahab admits he’s “fates lieutenant” and uses the word “brave” to inspire his shipmates in the following passage.  He probably felt brave himself as well at the time, but I wonder if his emotion may have been misguided:

“I  am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.  Look thou, underling!  That thou obeyest mine. – Stand round me, men… So with Moby Dick – two days he’s floated – to-morrow will be the third.  Aye, men, he’ll rise once more, – but only to spout his last!  D’ye feel brave men, brave?” (497)

He has nothing to lose by fighting Moby Dick even with the presence of all these bad omens and ominous signs.  Anything less than his actions, which were essentially suicide, would have appeared downright cowardly!  Melville could be conveying a message about illusory bravery.  Possibly that our typical heroes may be less brave than they seem.  Ishmael, the only crew member who survives, is not exactly the most brave or macho of the group.  I doubt this particular interpretation however because it’s not Ahab’s fault – he never received the chance to be truly brave because he never really had something to lose.  In reality, this is just a sad story.  An obsessed man with too much power went too far and realized A LOT of collateral damage.  Shame.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008

I have talked several times about the delicate balance of madness and happiness found in whaling. As the novel draws to a close, I find that Melville gives more and more insight into this balance, and finally, right before Ahab’s death, puts the pieces together which, for me, truly explain Ahab’s madness.  Work with me, here: Ahab is out of touch with the forced, normal happiness of land, and has given himself over to the madness of the sea.  Although for most men, this would be a carefree and happy madness (according to Ishmael, anyway), because Ahab has forsaken his ties to land, he must totally rely on the idea of Self for happiness.  When Moby Dick attacks this Self and takes Ahab’s leg, Ahab is no longer whole, hence the aporia he experiences, and the vengeful chase that ensues.  Let’s look at the text.

As I have discussed in detail before, Ishmael talks about “settling” for domestic happiness:

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country. (Melville 456)

Although Ishmael is quite taken with the sea, there is still a balance with land to be had, which I believe can most easily be seen in Starbuck: he obviously needs his release and finds it in whaling, but he does have a wife and child to return to.  Ishmael, himself, sees it rather the other way around: he will bear the land as long as possible, and when he needs to, he will return to the sea: “Whenver my hypos get such an upper hand of me… then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as possible” (3).  Although Melville waits until the end of the novel, he finally reveals a large reason as to why Ahab is unstable: he has no ties to land:

Out of those forty years I have spent not three ashore… When I think of all this… how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare— fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow— wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!

He reveals, too, that his has a son that he has never seen.  Because of this, he admits that he is out of balance: that his soul has fed only on “dry nourishment”.  Because he has stopped trying to offset the wild madness of the sea with controlled happiness on land, he has lost his grip on humanity.  At this point, now, Melville has given all the pieces to Ahab’s madness, but we must go back in the book to put them all together.

The next step is to consider Ahab’s leg.  Taken from Moby Dick, the leg has already been listed as one of the founding reasons for the captain’s vengeful quest.  But why, one might ask, did this affect him so much? Melville reveals this in chapter 106, “Ahab’s Leg”. After suffering an accident,

[Ahab’s] ivory limb having been so violently displaced… it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.  Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.  Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

With every mishap, every occurrence that reminds Ahab of his false leg, his is also reminded of “a former woe”, in that all the feelings of emasculation that Ahab feel are directly connected to the original emasculation he suffered at the jaws of Moby Dick.  The loss of his leg, then, is a direct occurrence that has given Ahab his aporia, and keeps him from his happiness.  I feel that this is true because by forsaking his family on land, Ahab isolates himself (as he admits to Starbuck).  Because of this self-isolation, Ahab can only rely on himself for happiness.  Because, one might say, all of his eggs are in one basket, when Moby Dick crushes that basket by the removal of Ahab’s leg, the whale single handedly removes the link to happiness that Ahab finds within the idea of Self.  Although a man that still retained the saneness from land-living might be able to get past this, the wild madness that Ahab has permanently given himself over to is now forever tainted.  So now, hopefully, you see my point: Ahab, given all over to lonely madness, relies on self for happiness.  Because Moby Dick makes this impossible, Ahab goes on a vengeful quest to avenge his leg, and therefore makes Moby Dick into a malicious character that is directly barring him from contentment.

The extent of his vengeful madness is shown when the Pequod meets the Rachel.  As the Rachel’s captain calls for aid to find his missing son, Ahab says “Touch not a rope-yarn.  Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.  Even now I lose time” (579).  Ahab is so wrapped up in his pursuit of Moby Dick, that one might say his leg is, in a way, his own son, and he cannot give up searching for it.  Just as the loss of Captain Gardiner’s son keeps him from being whole, Ahab’s leg is the same for him: he has no connection to humanity, and thus all his love and happiness is intertwined in the self, which was destroyed by the whale.  So, while Ahab eternally mourns his loss of whole self, his the Rachel weeps for Ahab, lost eternally from humanity.

I would like to analyze the chapter The Spirit-Spout through style and narration, the structure which houses “the spirit.” This is one of my favorite chapters of the novel, and I think this chapter shows how great of a lyricist and poet Melville can be. Because of its natural fluidity as opposed to Ishmael’s usual choppiness of style, I think this was one of the easiest chapters for Melville to write and therefore more revealing.

You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book — and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.

http://www.melville.org/letter7.htm

Melville wrote these words in a famous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne on November 15, 1851, parts of which we discussed during our Gender and Madness lecture. What is the soul, the spirit of Moby-Dick? Could it be the same depicted in the Spirit-Spout, the chapter that Hawthorne’s wife admired so much?

There are many elements of style that Melville uses in this chapter to achieve his effect. In the title and the first few paragraphs he uses an usual form of alliteration known as sibilance, or repetition with the letter ‘s.’

…one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. (224)

This form has a very classical feel. Today, it almost seems archaic or dream-like. Though the term “sibilance” originated in 1823, the term sibilant, meaning “having, containing, or producing the sound of or a sound resembling that of the s or the sh in sash,” came into English in 1669 from the Latin sibilare, to hiss, whistle, of imaginative origin (Merriam-Webster). Whether classic or pseudo-classic, by using repetition, and this unusual manifestation of it, Melville creates a deliberately unreal atmosphere with a spark of the sublime. Such metaphors as “the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver” makes one think of Biblical scrolls or ancient knowledge, also adding to the classical and mystical feel.

There is also something strange about the way the silvery jet is introduced. The first time, the action of the jet “rising” is not given until two clauses afterwards, and then only in an indirect way, through metaphor.

…on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. (224)

By placing the verb later on Melville gives the impression that the spout is static, that it has always been there, almost like the  men of the Pequod have come across a fixed glistening rod jutting out of the sea. It doesn’t disappear until the end of the next paragraph, and even then he doesn’t describe it descending. He just says “yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night.” By leaving out action, Melville gives the illusion of apparition. Most of Melville’s symbolism lies in his style.

…some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. (225)

By appearing and disappearing, it is both eternal and ephemeral. By repetition, coming every night at the same hour, Melville gives the impression of a consciousness, a purposeful intelligence, an order.

Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be. (225)

Here, Melville gives the action right away: it is jetted; but even so, it is done mysteriously, as if there was no cause or originator of the action.

Another trick Melville likes to use is sharp, strong contrasts of which these are just some:

“…his [Fedallah’s] turban and the moon, companions in one sky.” (225)

“…she [the Pequod] rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her–one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.” (225)

“While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.” (225)

“Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he [Ahab] would not seek that respose in his hammock.” (227)

These contrasts make us more aware of our reality and the constant alternative. By putting Fedallah’s turban in the same frame as the moon, Melville simply, but powerfully conjures up humanity and eternity, or as Mary Warnock puts it in her book of the same title, imagination and time. By stripping the scene down to its bare essentials, it makes us more aware, even while it seems less real. It also makes us feel more alone with our humanity, like the men at sea.

(In the blog post Phantom Ship, Josana takes a look at the symbolism of the sea-ravens in which she also notices that “second sentence seems to suggest that the Pequod hangs on the balance of life and death.”)

Who or what is the Spirit-Spout supposed to be? I think that is exactly what Melville wants us to wonder. While this may seem like a dream or loll in the text compared to the storm developing in the reader’s mind–Melville, “still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.”

And sometimes one can recognize the spirit through the form. In a book perhaps mangled and imperfect, while the birds weigh down on Ahab’s ship, Melville’s thoughts take flight.

As I pointed out in class today, there are many striking similarities between  the ending of Moby Dick and the battle sequence in the Iliad. The first connection is the presence of prophecies. While they are a normal cultural and religious aspect of Antiquity, the idea of something as supernatural as a prophecy in Moby Dick surprised me. Going along with the more general similarities, the fact that an entire crew is chasing a violent, demonic monster. This theme is the basis for many ancient Greek literature, especially in the Odyssey.

Now for the more specific connections: The brotherhood but also the differences between Ahab and Fedallah. In the Iliad, Achilles and Hector are both great war heroes, and they even sympathize with each other, but their personalities are completely opposite. Achilles is intensely driven, violent, and angry, like Ahab. In fact, the source of Achilles’s anger is the loss of his friend, and for the duration of the book he is seeking revenge. Ahab is mourning his physical loss and promises he will get revenge on the culprit.

The prophecy that Hector will die before Achilles affects him heavily. The ironic part of this is that Achilles ends up being the one to kill Hector; ensuring his own death. In a very violent and drawn out battle scene, Achilles kills Hector and weeps for his death. Part of Greek tradition is the towing away of the loser by carriage. Hector, a noble prince with his wife and children watching, is promptly tied to the back of the carriage and is dragged around the fighting ring. His body becomes completely battered, bruised, and almost dismembered. In Moby Dick, Fedallah’s fate is identical. Not only is Ahab the cause of it, but he is dragged away via rope and his body goes through a very violent, post-mortem mangling.

There are so many similarities that is impossible to find the end of Moby Dick surprising. Achilles, the most powerful warrior in all of Greece, dies the boring and anticlimactic death of being shot in the heel. Ahab is caught by a rope. The use of foreshadowing by mimicking the most famous scene of the Iliad was a brilliant move on Melville’s part.

The Epilogue to Moby Dick provides the reader a chance to psychoanalyze Ishmael. At this point at the end of the novel the reader is now intimately familiar with Ishmael and comes to expect a certain kind of commentary from him on significant events. I argue however that there is nothing unexpected in the Epilogue, and instead Ishmael responds in the exact way that we as readers should expect him to.

Notice Ishmael’s cold and detached tone when describing the apocalyptic scene around him. This might seem surprising to some, however we have read the novel, and as such we as readers wouldn’t expect anything to make Ishmael jump out of his seat in a show of extraversion. This is not to say that Ishmael does not understand the severity of the situation he has found himself in, but instead Ishmael simply continues to be himself and describes the scene in the same way he has described everything else in the novel that he narrated regardless of how epic. I feel like we would have much more to talk about if Ishmael suddenly sounded like an Old Testament prophet proclaiming the woes of his plight, now that would have been strange! So while yes, we do expect to hear Ishmael end his moments of narration with some sort of philosophic insight on the matter at hand, I believe it is quite understandable why on the surface it seems that Ishmael does not comment on the significance of his situation. Most notably is the fact that this Epilogue seems to be coming from a time that is somewhat removed from the events of the rest of the novel. As a result Ishmael would be of the mindset that he had just explained the significance of his story for roughly 500 pages and in the Epilogue there is nothing to say except “The End”.

There is no need for one final philosophic statement at the end of the Epilogue because the purpose of “Moby Dick” as a whole would have been to help Ishmael sort out his understanding of all of the events that led to his being the sole survivor of the tragedy. Additionally, if Ishmael were to make an insightful statement here, it arguably would lessen some of the beauty that is Melville’s vision for the novel. It is astounding how many valid readings there are to take from the novel, and Melville likely understood that his symbolism could be interpreted many different ways. Honestly, had Ishmael concluded the Epilogue by saying “And now I know that man can not defeated God” I would have felt rather let down. Wouldn’t a clear statement about the macro intention of the work have belittled each wonderfully crafted statement along the way? We know how Ishmael feels about Moby Dick, Ahab, Queequeg, and all of the other people and things mentioned in the story, great literature does not need an Aesop-esque moral at the end.

The Epilogue is not without its symbolism or meaning; it is quite possible for one to spend a very long time thinking about the significance of Ishmael being saved by Queequeg’s coffin, or what it means for Ishmael to have been the rescued orphan of the Rachel, but when discussing matters of narrator and narration through a psychoanalytical lens it becomes far more important that we recognize why it is that Ishmael seemingly chooses to ignore this symbolism that at other times in the novel he would’ve been all over. Ishmael believes his work is done at this point in the novel, and it is now up to the reader to think through this symbolism without Ishmael, or Melville for that matter, holding their hand.