Moby-Dick — themes & analysis

The figure of Captain Ahab has occupied criticism for a hundred and seventy years, and the disagreement has not settled. Ahab on his previous voyage had his leg taken off below the knee by a particular sperm whale of unusual size and notorious cunning — the white whale Moby Dick. He returned home half-mad, recovered partially, and accepted command of the Pequod for what was supposed to be a normal commercial whaling voyage. From the moment he comes on deck, he reveals that the voyage will be normal in name only.

The decisive scene is Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, in which Ahab gathers the crew, makes them swear to the hunt, and answers his first mate Starbuck's protest that the whale is a dumb brute striking out of blindest instinct. Ahab will not have it. The whale, for him, is the visible mask of an invisible malice that pervades the universe — not just an animal but the readable sign of whatever is wrong with the cosmos. He has, he says, only one quarrel: to strike through the mask.

Reading Ahab as simply mad understates what Melville is doing. Reading him as a hero overstates it. He is a man who has correctly perceived that the universe contains something terrible, and who has incorrectly concluded that the right response is to attack it personally with the ship and crew at his disposal. His rhetoric is so good that the crew swears to it. Starbuck resists and cannot prevail. The hunt continues across the Atlantic, around the Cape, into the Pacific.

The cost of Ahab's reading of the world is, in the end, every life on board except Ishmael's. The whale destroys the Pequod and swims on. The monomania does not purchase even the satisfaction of success — it purchases a wreckage and a single floating witness, clinging to a coffin, who was never really part of Ahab's plan and survives precisely because of that.

Where to follow it: Ch. 28 (Ahab appears), Ch. 36 (The Quarter-Deck — the swearing), Ch. 41 (Moby Dick — Ishmael on the obsession), Ch. 132 (The Symphony — Ahab's last moment of doubt), Ch. 135 (The Chase, Third Day).

Moby Dick as symbol has occupied every generation of readers since the book's rediscovery in the 1920s, and the novel resists every final reading. Ahab's reading: the whale is the mask of cosmic malice. Starbuck's: the whale is a dumb beast and to read more into it is blasphemy. Ishmael's: the whale is whiteness itself, the leviathan of Job, the thing the human imagination cannot hold. The cetological chapters' refusal to make any final claim. And the closing image — the whale destroying the Pequod and swimming on — which itself refuses interpretation.

The most famous chapter on the question, Chapter 42, On the Whiteness of the Whale, takes the colour rather than the creature as its subject. Through a sustained baroque catalogue of associations, whiteness is shown to mean almost anything: the lamb, the dove, the bride, the polar bear, the albatross, the leper, the ghost, the blank page, the void. The chapter ends not with a synthesis but with a recognition that the very indeterminacy of the colour is part of what makes Moby Dick terrifying — the whale resists final reading the way the universe does.

The demand to make the whale mean one thing is the demand at the heart of Ahab's madness. He requires the whale to mean cosmic malice so that the hunt has a target and the universe has an adversary. The novel shows what happens when a man with that demand has a ship and a crew at his disposal.

The book's ambivalence about its own central symbol is part of what makes it modern. Almost every American novelist of the twentieth century who attempted serious symbolic fiction had to reckon with Melville's lesson: that a great symbol is not a coded message awaiting decryption but a presence the imagination cannot finally exhaust.

Where to follow it: Ch. 42 (The Whiteness of the Whale), Ch. 99 (The Doubloon — each man reads it differently), Ch. 133 (The Chase, First Day), Ch. 135 (The Chase, Third Day — the whale swims on).

Ishmael is one of the most unusual narrators in nineteenth-century fiction. We never learn his real name — Call me Ishmael is a self-given biblical alias. He has very little autobiography; we know almost nothing about his family or his earlier life. He is, structurally, the consciousness through which we encounter everything else, and his voice is by turns curious, lyrical, ironic, philosophical, and (in the cetology chapters) pseudo-scholarly.

What grounds the consciousness is one relationship. His friendship with Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner from the fictional South Pacific island of Kokovoko, begins under farcical circumstances — two strangers assigned to share a bed at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford — and becomes the moral counterweight to Ahab's solipsism. Queequeg is generous, brave, religiously serious in ways the supposedly Christian crew is not, and unflinching in the face of his own near-death.

When Queequeg falls ill in the middle Pacific and believes himself dying, he commissions a coffin from the ship's carpenter, lies in it to test it, and then unaccountably recovers. Later, when the ship's original life-buoy is lost, the carpenter seals and converts the coffin into a replacement. This is the object Ishmael clings to in the Epilogue, after the Pequod sinks and every other man has drowned.

Queequeg's last gift to his friend is the means of his survival — given without intending it, in a preparation for his own death that turned out to be preparation for Ishmael's life. The friendship is the novel's quiet argument: that whatever survives a confrontation with the kind of universe Ahab has glimpsed, what survives it is not the heroic individual who meets it head-on but the friend who, by ordinary kindness, has prepared — without intending to — the means by which somebody can live.

Where to follow it: Ch. 3 (Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed), Ch. 10 (A Bosom Friend — friendship sealed), Ch. 110 (Queequeg in his coffin), Ch. 126 (The Life-Buoy — coffin converted).

Roughly a quarter of Moby-Dick consists of chapters that are not narrative. They are about whales — about cetology, the species and their classification; about the anatomy of the sperm whale; about the methods of the fishery; about the equipment of a whaling ship; about the history of whaling literature. These chapters drive some readers away and bring others back to the book year after year.

Melville's purpose is multiple. He is genuinely interested in whales and whaling, and he wants the reader to be. He is constructing the reality of the world the Pequod moves through, so that when the white whale finally appears the reader has been trained to see him with a whaler's eyes. He is also setting up the metaphysical confrontation: by giving the reader chapter after chapter of the whale as natural-historical object — measurable, classifiable, killable by harpoon — he prepares the irony of the closing chapters in which all of that empirical knowledge turns out to be useless against the actual creature.

The encyclopedic form has an American future. It runs from Moby-Dick through Henry Adams's Education to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Wallace. The great American novel that wants to think about a single subject by absorbing every available kind of knowledge about it owes Melville more than any of the others.

The cetology chapters are the engine of that tradition. Read them. They are not filler. They are the slow accumulation of pressure that the three-day chase requires.

Where to follow it: Ch. 32 (Cetology — the taxonomy of whales), Ch. 55 (Monstrous Pictures of Whales), Ch. 74 (The Sperm Whale's Head), Ch. 87 (The Grand Armada).

Melville is careful to make the Pequod's crew an image of the country he is writing in. Ahab is from Nantucket, an old New England Quaker whaling family. Starbuck the first mate is also Nantucket Quaker. The three harpooners are Queequeg the Polynesian, Tashtego the Wampanoag from Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, and Daggoo the African. The crew below them is from everywhere — Manxmen, Spaniards, Maltese, Chinese, Lascars, Tahitians, Long Islanders.

The Pequod is named after a New England Native nation that the Puritans had massacred two centuries earlier. The ship is, in other words, an American crew on a vessel named for a destroyed people, captained by a man who has nailed a Spanish doubloon — a colonial-era coin from another empire — to the mast as the prize of a hunt he has converted to private vengeance. The polity is recognizable.

Melville is writing in 1850-51, ten years before the Civil War, in a country whose entire prosperity depended on enslaved labour in the South and whose expansion was driven by the destruction of the peoples of the West. He does not write a polemic; the political reading of the Pequod is allegorical and quiet. But the closing image — the entire crew dragged down with the ship by the obsession of one man, an American flag still flying as the topmast goes under — has been read by every generation of American critics as a prophecy of what national monomania, untempered by Starbuck's voice of restraint, can do to a polity.

The whale destroys the ship. Nothing remains except, by accident, a single witness clinging to the coffin a friend made before he died.

Where to follow it: Ch. 16 (The Ship — the Pequod described), Ch. 26 (Knights and Squires — the crew catalogued), Ch. 89 (Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish — the political allegory), Ch. 135 (The Chase, Third Day — the flag goes under).