Why Read Moby-Dick

Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.”
    Ishmael insists, however, that he did not totally succumb to an Ahab view of the world. Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick is based on hatred. “He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” Ishmael, on the other hand, is more afraid than angry, and true to his aesthetically sensitive, essentially Romantic nature; he is most frightened not by the size and strength of Moby Dick but by his distinctive color. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” he says.
    What ensues in chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” is the antithesis of the Nantucket chapter. Instead of rhetorical elation, the point is complete and total depletion. Whiteness evokes, Ishmael insists, “the demonism in the world.” It “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.” It is “a dumb blankness, full of meaning, ... a colorless, all-color of atheism.” Even worse, the whiteness of the whale suggests that the whole visible world, the world of beauty and of love, is a fraud: “[T]he sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.... [P]ondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper.... And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
    It is with this chapter that Ishmael loses his faith, his nerve, his confidence. He comes down from the inspiring heights of the topmast and, like everyone aboard the Pequod, is drawn irresistibly into Ahab’s angry, iron-grooved way.
    Ishmael’s transformation echoes what was happening to the northern portion of the United States when Melville was working on Moby-Dick . During the fall of 1850 and the winter of 1851, Boston became the epicenter of outrage over the Fugitive Slave Law, and Melville’s father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, was the reluctant focal point. Although Shaw hated slavery, he also loved his country and its laws, which it was his duty to uphold. So it was Shaw who ordered that a slave who’d made his way to Boston be turned over to his Southern captors. Riots and general bedlam erupted, with Shaw being hanged in effigy after the decision. New England gentlemen who had once viewed the South from the safety of their own mastheads had finally been drawn into slavery’s pernicious vortex. What to do?
    Nothing, of course. As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all. “My soul is more than matched,” Starbuck laments, “she’s overmanned; and by a madman!” Just like Starbuck, America’s leaders in the 1850s looked at one another with vacant, deer-in-the-headlights stares as the United States, a great and noble country crippled by a lie, slowly but inevitably sailed toward its cataclysmic encounter with the source of its discontents.

11
    The Sea
    W e Americans love our wilderness: that empty space full of beckoning dreams, the unknown land into which we can disappear, only to return years later, wiser, careworn, and rich. Most of us think of the West as this hinterland of opportunity, but Melville knew that the original wilderness was the “everlasting terra incognita” of the sea. Even today, long after every terrestrial inch of the planet has been surveyed and mapped, only a small portion of the sea’s total volume has been explored by man. Back in 1850, Melville commented that “Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one.”
    Today the American West is a place of cities, suburbs, ghost towns, and national parks. It is civilized. Not so the sea. “[H]owever baby man may brag of his science and skill,” Ishmael ominously intones, “and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for