Why Read Moby-Dick

appreciation for the liberating power of democracy, what Ishmael calls the “democratic dignity” that distinguished America (with, of course, the notable exception of Southern slavery) from just about every other country in the mid-nineteenth century. In the dangerous work environment of the whale fishery it didn’t matter what your race or background was; what mattered was whether you could do your job. At one point the Pequod ’s third mate, Flask, climbs onto the shoulders of his towering black harpooneer Daggoo so he can get a better view of a pod of whales. “[T]he sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious,” Ishmael observes, “for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.” In this single image, Melville has managed to illustrate what he calls elsewhere the “divine equality” of humanity even as he provides a scathing critique of slavery. Flask may outrank Daggoo, but it is the African harpooneer who literally carries the third mate on his shoulders.
    Democracy in principle, Ishmael maintains, “radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute!” This is not to say, however, that democracy is problem-free. “[T]ake high abstracted man alone,” Ishmael says, “and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates.” For in every age, there will be a threat to the principle of “divine equality,” and his name is Ahab.

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    Ahab
    H e doesn’t appear until almost a quarter of the way into the book, in chapter 28. Like that of the shark in the movie Jaws, his entrance is all the more powerful because of the delay.
    Ishmael has just reported on deck for the forenoon watch when he glances aft and sees the Pequod ’s commander for the first time. Like America in 1850, Ahab is a man divided, seared and parboiled by the conflagration raging inside him. “He looked,” Ishmael tells us, “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.... Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.”
    With his whalebone leg planted in an auger hole in the quarterdeck and grasping a shroud in one of his hands, Ahab scans the ocean ahead. “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.” There is also a sad grandeur about the man. Ishmael calls him “moody stricken Ahab . . . with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.”
    Gradually, we learn Ahab’s backstory. In the days and weeks after losing his leg to the White Whale during his previous voyage, he found his agonies, both physical and mental, unbearable, and his mates had no choice but to “lace him fast, . . . raving in his hammock.” As the ship pounded through a succession of terrible gales and Ahab swung back and forth, writhing and screaming within his makeshift straitjacket, a terrible transformation took place within him: “[H]is torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfus-ing, made him mad.”
    In his madness, Ahab came to see Moby Dick as more than a mere whale; he was “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... [A]ll evil, to crazy Ahab, [was] visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.” Once back on Nantucket, Ahab seemed to have fully recovered his senses. In truth, “his hidden self, raved on,” and he resolved