Why Read Moby-Dick

“That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.” It is then that a tear leaks from Ahab’s eye and falls into the sea. At that moment Starbuck comes upon the captain and pauses on the quarterdeck. Suddenly noticing the first mate, Ahab launches into a lament about the purposelessness of his purpose-driven life.
    We learn that he is fifty-eight years old and of the forty years he’s been a whaleman, he has spent not even three ashore. “When I think of this life I have led,” he tells Starbuck, “the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness . . . oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this . . . how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!” He is married and has a son, but what good is that given his commitment to the hunt? “I widowed that poor girl when I married her.” Like all of us wedded to our careers, whether we be doctors, teachers, truckers, lawyers, bond traders, or writers, he has missed what is truly important: “[W]hat a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?”
    Starbuck sees his chance. “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s. . . . How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
    But Ahab, all his strength and will drained out of him, is ultimately powerless to alter the momentum established after forty long years as a whaleman. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?”
    Starbuck eventually gives up and walks away. When Ahab crosses the quarterdeck and looks once again into the sea, he discovers with a start that another pair of eyes are reflected in the ocean’s windless surface—those of the evil puppet master, Fedallah. Starbuck, we realize, never had a chance.
    This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear.

25
    The Inmost Leaf
    I n his letters to Hawthorne, Melville provides snapshots of his psyche during and after the composition of his masterpiece. The same propulsive poetry that animates Moby-Dick runs through these missives, many of them wildly manic in their intimate revelations of what Melville was thinking about as his novel galloped, paused, then galloped again toward publication. I would go so far as to insist that reading Moby-Dick is not enough. You must read the letters to appreciate the personal and artistic forces that made the book possible.
    By early May, Melville was almost through with the novel he was then calling The Whale . Then he stopped writing. In early June he tells Hawthorne that for the last three weeks he had been “out of doors,—building and patching and tinkering away in all directions. Besides, I had my crops to get in,—corn and potatoes . . . and many other things to attend to, all accumulating upon this one particular season. I work myself; and at night my bodily sensations are akin to those I have so often felt before, when a hired man, doing my day’s work from sun to sun.”
    The hiatus has apparently been good for his creative energies, if not his sanity. Melville begins to sound like someone gone giddy on truth