Moby-Dick: A Seafaring Epic of Obsession

During his lifetime, the American author Herman Melville was known as a storyteller, as someone who could describe the romance of tropical islands and imbue them with a sense of adventure. His greatest work, Moby-Dick, departed from the charm and simplicity of his early works, and readers quickly grew tired of it. By Melville’s death the novel was out of print but has enjoyed a renaissance ever since. Almost every notable author and literary critic has affirmed its greatness. The American author and Nobel laureate William Faulkner once admitted that he wished he had written it. Moby-Dick defies easy summation. From the simple opening line, the novel expands into the kind of epic story one finds in the works of the Russian novelist and short story writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The comparison seems apt because both Moby-Dick and Dostoyevsky’s novels grapple with consequential issues and are full of philosophy, theology, psychology, and drama. At the same time, Moby- Dick follows in the tradition of Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and other seafaring novels of the Polish novelist Joseph Conrad and of the American author and Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in concerning itself with the open stretches that make the oceans unique. Here, in the oceans, one goes beyond the limits of terrestrial existence to find new adventures and new boundaries. In this seafaring novel, Melville grapples with all the old questions of philosophy and theology as he struggles to understand the ceaseless interplay between good and evil.

GEOGRAPHY OF PLACE. It is the geography of place that underscores the subtlety displayed in Melville’s Moby- Dick. While the reader prepares for a story set in New England, the geography rapidly expands as Captain Ahab and his crew sail into the ocean. The crew is not confined to the Atlantic but circles the watery globe in an act of circumnavigation. Oceans and not New England become the geography of Moby-Dick in Melville’s storytelling.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF EVIL. Captain Ahab’s far-flung exploits have a purpose. He is obsessed with killing a large white whale known as Moby-Dick. This aspiration seems cruel, but Ahab regards it as essential. Years earlier the whale, lashing out against its attacker, destroyed Ahab’s ship and deprived him of part of one leg. Now Ahab seeks revenge. The ambiguity emerges from the question as to who is more evil: Is it Ahab for wanting to kill Moby-Dick, or is it the whale for having taken Ahab’s leg? Melville never answers directly, but it is clear that Ahab projects the whale as a major source of evil. The fate of the world, it seems, rests on whether Ahab can exterminate Moby-Dick. Perhaps the job is too large for one person or one crew, but Ahab persists without thought of the difficulties of his undertaking.

THE NOBLE SAVAGE. Ahab has a polyglot crew composed of people of all nationalities. Among them is Queequeg, a Polynesian man who at first intimidates Ishmael, the narrator of the novel. But after the initial surprise, Queequeg becomes Ishmael’s fearless and loyal companion. He is by appearances what Europeans once called a savage. This sentiment arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans branded anyone who did not look or behave like them as primitive and ungodly. This was the period when Europeans extirpated the Amerindians and abused Africans in horrific ways. In many ways, deplorable treatment of people of African descent continues today. Yet ideas began to change, at least in some circles. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century opened a new chapter on ethnicity. The Enlightenment continued to classify these half- naked peoples as savages, but they were not inferior because of this status. They lived, it was thought, in a free society with the chance to indulge their passions and realize their ambitions. If they were savages, they were also noble, imbued with a quality that Europeans had lost in their ascent toward civilization and in their fall from grace in the opening chapters of Genesis. Put simply, Queequeg reflected Melville’s respect for people of color, a lesson he may have learned from the more liberal Enlightenment thinkers.

THE BIBLE. Melville’s attitudes toward religion were ambiguous as well. Parts of Moby-Dick seem to be a polemic against the hell-and-brimstone approach of some clerics. Yet Melville was well-versed in the Bible. Ahab, once a king of Israel, appears here as a ship’s captain. Even though Moby-Dick is not a fish, it seems to evoke the sense of powerlessness and terror that Jonah felt upon being taken by a large fish. In a larger sense, Moby-Dick may be a commentary on the book of Job. Despite his innocence, Job suffers a series of disasters, exactly what befalls the crew. In the end, Moby-Dick smashes Ahab’s ship and leaves only one person alive to tell the story, just as in Job, only one person remains alive after each disaster to inform Job of what has befallen his family and property. Either God is inscrutable or we inhabit an inscrutable universe.

FURTHER READING: Melville, Herman. 1983. The Best of Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, Omoo, Typee, Israel Potter. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books.

Reiff, Raychel Haugrund. 2008. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick and Other Works. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark.

Selby, Nick, ed. 1999. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. New York: Columbia University Press.

Way, Brian. 1978. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick. London: E. Arnold.