Moby Dick

At the very start of Melville’s Moby Dick, we meet our narrator, Ishmael.  Before we can even escape the confines of the first paragraph, he immediately throws his sanity into question: “…whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me… then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball” (Melville 3).  In terms of narration, Ishmael has now made it quite difficult for the reader to trust his oncoming reports.  When he admits that this time around he wants to try a whaling voyage, that distrust deepens; why would the reader ever trust the perspective of a man with the desire to virtually enslave himself for 3-5 years?

But, as we soon see, this madness is all relative.  Perhaps, one might think, to be a whaler a man must contain some type of madness within himself, whether it be the madness of Ahab’s aporia, Starbuck’s superstition, Stubb and Flask’s self medication, or Pip’s susceptibility to the endless vaults of the sea.  After meeting these personalities, Ishmael’s manic-depressive manner seems to fit right in with the motley crew of the Pequod.

Ishmael’s madness is managed (or expressed, one might say) largely in his complete abandonment of the construct of “happiness” as seen on shore.  As Ishmael has his first shift at the masthead in open water, he reflects on how his happiness and his madness intertwine and how they manifest themselves in whaling as a solution: “The whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber” (172).  Ishmael sees the root of his madness in his philosophic mind; he loves the masthead because it gives his mind a temporary outlet, alleviating his melancholy… or perhaps heightening its control over him, so he can lose himself within it (which is arguably what happens to Pip when he falls overboard).  As we discussed in class, this makes him a bad sailor, but it is one of the reasons he is drawn to whaling.

Another time we see Ishmael reflecting on this is in his first interaction with spermaceti.  It is the first time that Ishmael really articulates (both for us and most likely for himself) his reasons for abandoning shore in his depression:

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; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally.  (456)

Ishmael sees the construct of life on land as something barring men from their true happiness-society forces man to come to grips with what he lacks, and to form his new happiness around domestic life.  The manual work of bursting clods of spermaceti finally allows Ishmael to unlock his own true happiness, and we finally see why he rejects life on the land at his most depressed: escaping the confines of the earth allows him to unlock his true happiness, and at the same time and revel in his madness, rather than suppress it. 

Works Cited:

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