Why Read Moby-Dick

eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.”
    When Queequeg was on Nantucket, he saw, Ishmael relates, “certain little canoes of dark wood . . . ; and upon inquiry, he . . . learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes.” Since his own people laid out their dead in canoes, he decided that he, too, should be buried in a “coffin-canoe,” and the carpenter subsequently builds him one of these formfitting vessels with some old planks taken from a grove of trees on a South Seas island named, cunningly enough, Lackaday.
    Like the Essex crew members, who fitted out their own coffin-canoes with what provisions they salvaged from the wreck, Queequeg prepares his craft for a voyage to eternity, requesting that his harpoon, some biscuits, a flask of water, a bag containing “woody earth scraped up in the hold,” and a piece of folded sailcloth for a pillow be placed in the coffin. Once all is in readiness and Queequeg has climbed into the coffin to make sure it is “a good fit,” he suddenly begins to feel better. “[I]t was Queequeg’s conceit,” Ishmael says, “that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him.” Within a few days, Queequeg is fully recovered and decides to use his coffin-canoe as a sea chest. Later in the novel, after the Pequod ’s life buoy is lost during an unsuccessful attempt to save a sailor who has fallen from the rigging, Queequeg offers his sea chest as a replacement. And so his former coffin-canoe is caulked and sealed and turned into a life buoy, the irony of which is not lost on Ahab. “A life-buoy of a coffin!” he soliloquizes. “Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that.”
    Queequeg, the instigator of this unsettling transformation, remains an enigma to the end. The tattoos on his body were etched by one of his island’s holy men “who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out . . . a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read.”
    For Ahab, who spends his days and nights ruminating on the meaning of the universe, Queequeg’s mere presence is a torment, providing hints but no answers in his eternal quest for certainty. One morning, Ishmael recounts, Ahab turns from the harpooneer with a frustrated cry: “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”

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    Pulling Dictatorship Out of a Hat
    J ust about anyone, it turns out, can be a demagogue or a dictator if he or she masters a few simple tricks, what Ishmael calls “some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.” As a result, most leaders “become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.” Dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein are not geniuses; they are power-hungry, paranoid, and expert manipulators of men. If you want to understand how these and other megalomaniacs pull it off, read the last third of Moby-Dick and watch as Ahab tightens his stranglehold on the Pequod ’s crew through a series of magic tricks worthy of Las Vegas.
    It begins with the sacrilegious forging of the harpoon meant to kill Moby Dick (“‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine pa-tris, sed in nomine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood”). Then Ahab tramples his quadrant (“Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy”) and waves around his demonically glowing harpoon during a terrifying storm only to blow out the lurid fire with his own hot breath. Finally, there is the equally dramatic magnetizing of a new compass needle to replace the one blasted by lightning. The cumulative effect of these over-the-top acts of prestidigitation is a purposeful numbing of the crew’s (and, it must be admitted, the reader’s) emotions as