Moby Dick

Pip, as the only major African-American character in the novel, provides a unique commentary on racial issues of 19^th century America. Melville, or rather, Ishmael presents Pip as “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew” who merely serves as the Pequod’s ship-keeper, a sailor who stays on the ship while the whaleboats go out (Melville 398). However, from the moment Pip enters the novel his race plays a significant role in dictating his interactions and relationship with the other crew members.

Pip’s first soliloquy reveals to the reader all of the dangers he faces as a young African American boy on board the ship. Although he is evidently afraid of the storm and the inevitable encounter with Moby Dick, he is also afraid of the actions of the white sailors. It is apparent that his racial difference affects both his relationships with men and, in a larger sense, with God. In chapter 40, Midnight, Forecastle, Melville allows Pip to belittle himself and his race by submitting to the religious customs of the white Americans as an inferior ‘black’ being.

“Oh, though big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!” (Melville 171).

In chapter 93, Castaways, Ishmael highlights Pip’s immense fear of the sea, his unique relationship with the white men on the ship, and his symbolic role as the African American slave. In the beginning of the chapter when Melville compares Pip to the ship’s steward, Dough-Boy, he simultaneously elevates African-Americans while blatantly portraying racial stereotypes.  Ishmael describes Pip as “over tender-hearted, but at the bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe which ever enjoys all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race” Ishmael goes so far as to instruct the reader: “Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, paneled in king’s cabinets” (Melville 399). Ishmael’s depiction of Pip represents the 19^th century white man’s skewed view of the black race. Although the recognition of Pip’s ‘brilliance’ and his superiority to Dough-Boy reveals the greater humanity and more developed character of the black man in contrast to his white counterpart, the very nature of Ishamael’s description of Pip’s ‘tribe’  presents an extremely cliché racial representation. For example; the idea that African-Americans are constantly jolly and that they all play the tambourine.

Chapter 93 also contains a critical turning plot piece regarding Pip’s role in the novel. However, I won’t be addressing Pip’s dramatic shift to an integral symbol of insanity as a result of  being left to drift alone in the open sea, but rather his interactions with the other crew members during this fiasco.  In this Chapter Pip has been temporarily reassigned to Stubb’s whaleboat crew. The first time out he jumps from the boat, causing Stubb and Tashtego to lose their already harpooned whale. Upon this discretion Stubb forcefully lectures Pip on the importance of ‘sticking to the boat’. Interestingly, Stubb makes an obvious allusion to slavery in saying that “a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama” (Melville 400).  This reference emphasizes the presence of slavery in 19^th century America and reveals the social acceptance of a statement such as this. After Stubb attempts to use this statement to control Pip’s actions Ishmael interjects with insightful commentary regarding human tendencies of slavery, “Perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal , which propensity too often interferes with is benevolence” (Melville 400). It can be read that Melville intended this segment to be a critique of slavery and a broader commentary on human’s innate tendencies to ignore morality for self gain and, more specifically, monetary profit. This chapter is one of the many in Moby Dick that Melville has utilized to interject his negative feelings towards slavery in America.