{"id":788,"date":"2010-02-17T02:36:51","date_gmt":"2010-02-17T06:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=788"},"modified":"2010-02-17T02:36:51","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T06:36:51","slug":"madness-and-happiness-found-in-whaling-and-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=788","title":{"rendered":"Madness and happiness found in whaling and the sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the very start of Melville\u2019s Moby Dick, <\/em>we meet our narrator, Ishmael.\u00a0 Before we can even escape the confines of the first paragraph, he immediately throws his sanity into question: \u201c\u2026whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me\u2026 then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.\u00a0 This is my substitute for pistol and ball\u201d (Melville 3).\u00a0 In terms of narration, Ishmael has now made it quite difficult for the reader to trust his oncoming reports.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

But, as we soon see, this madness is all relative.\u00a0 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\u2019s aporia, Starbuck\u2019s superstition, Stubb and Flask\u2019s self medication, or Pip\u2019s susceptibility to the endless vaults of the sea.\u00a0 After meeting these personalities, Ishmael\u2019s manic-depressive manner seems to fit right in with the motley crew of the Pequod.<\/p>\n

Ishmael\u2019s madness is managed (or expressed, one might say) largely in his complete abandonment of the construct of \u201chappiness\u201d as seen on shore.\u00a0 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: \u201cThe 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\u201d (172).\u00a0 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\u2026 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).\u00a0 As we discussed in class, this makes him a bad sailor, but it is one of the reasons he is drawn to whaling.<\/p>\n

Another time we see Ishmael reflecting on this is in his first interaction with spermaceti.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 (456)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/p>\n

Melville, Herman.\u00a0Moby Dick<\/em>. Northwestern University Press, 1988. Reissued 2003. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the very start of Melville\u2019s Moby Dick, we meet our narrator, Ishmael.\u00a0 Before we can even escape the confines of the first paragraph, he immediately throws his sanity into question: \u201c\u2026whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me\u2026 then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[261,260],"class_list":["post-788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whaling","tag-ishamel","tag-madness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":790,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions\/790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}