Why Read Moby-Dick

all of us become servile automatons to Ahab’s unalterable purpose: “Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.”
    There are occasional brief reprieves when the Pequod meets yet another whaleship with news of Moby Dick (each ship representing its own alternative to the Ahab way), but as the final showdown approaches, we have become so scorched and crushed and otherwise slapped around by Ahab in his magnificent emergence as an evil superhero that it becomes increasingly difficult to care.
    But that is precisely the point.

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    Essex Redux
    W e all struggle with the demands of work. We need the money to support ourselves and our families, but when does a job, especially the pat on the back for a job well done, begin to distract us from the much more difficult work of being a good parent and spouse? If you want to understand how a job can destroy a person, read not only Moby-Dick but the real-life story that underlies much of the latter portion of the novel.
    In April 1851, just about the time Melville was entering the final stages of writing Moby-Dick, he received a copy of Owen Chase’s narrative of the Essex disaster, the same book he had read a decade before as a whaleman in the Pacific. The Chase narrative had come via a Nantucket friend of his father-in-law’s, and this may have been the first time he’d read the account (which had become quite rare) since his introduction to the story in the forecastle of the Acushnet . Just as he was writing notes to himself in the back pages of his volumes of Shakespeare’s plays, Melville wrote down relevant memories of his connection to the Essex in the Chase volume.
    In addition to recounting how he came to read the book for the first time, he writes about seeing none other than Owen Chase himself during a gam with the ship Charles Carroll . (Historians have since established that Melville was mistaken in this claim, but for our purposes the important point is that Melville thought he saw Chase.) “He was a large, powerful well-made man; rather tall . . . with a handsome face for a Yankee, & expressive of great uprightness & calm unostentatious courage. His whole appearance impressed me pleasurably. He was the most prepossessing-looking whale-hunter I think I ever saw.” But like the captain of the Essex, George Pollard, whose bad luck continued when his next command struck an uncharted reef off Hawaii and sank, “the miserable pertina-ciousness of misfortune . . . did likewise hunt poor Owen, tho’ somewhat more dilatory in overtaking him, the second time.” Melville heard that soon after the gam with the Acushnet, Chase received “letters from home, informing him of the certain infidelity of his wife, the mother of several children.... We also heard that this receipt of this news had told most heavily upon Chase, & that he was a prey to the deepest gloom.”
    What moves Melville now, ten years after first reading Chase’s narrative, is the personal plight of the participants. Not mere symbols, Chase and Pollard are men who have been bludgeoned by fate. There is a pathos, even a tenderness, that enters Moby-Dick in its final chapters, and it was Melville’s memory of the real men behind the Essex, Nantucketers who never completely escaped the shadow of that disaster, that brought a much-needed injection of humanity to his attempts to bring his dangerously digressive, sometimes bombastic novel to a close.
    It begins with chapter 128, when the Pequod meets the Rachel, whose captain has halted his pursuit of whales to search for the missing whaleboat containing his son. In this heartbreaking chapter, in which the captain unsuccessfully pleads with Ahab to assist him in his search, we see the terrifying coldness behind Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick. It is not until chapter 132, “The Symphony,” however, that all the sadness and despair of Melville’s notes in the Chase narrative, particularly when it comes to the fragility of domestic happiness, come to the fore in Ahab’s conversation with the conscience of the Pequod, Starbuck.
    The chapter begins on the quarterdeck on the morning of a beautiful “steel-blue day.” Ahab is alone, looking out across the serene Pacific.