Why Read Moby-Dick

of the . . . nutmeg.” In the destruction of two whaleboats, Melville is also portraying the disintegration of his talent.
    Day Three dawns clear and fresh, and the narrative takes a breather. “What a lovely day again!” Ahab marvels. “[W]ere it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.” He then lapses into a soliloquy that echoes Melville’s complaint to Hawthorne that he has rarely known the quiet circumstances required to produce proper creative writing. “Thinking is, or ought to be,” Ahab says, “a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.” Here Melville touches on that dynamic tension between active and passive engagement. If the author simply sits back like God and casts judgment, the verdict is inevitably less than persuasive. What makes for good writing is when the author somehow achieves perspective within the tumult of the moment, and this is exactly what Melville accomplishes in Moby-Dick .
    But back to Ahab, who happens to have good reason to be agitated. Amid the chaotic furor of the previous day’s action, Fedallah mysteriously disappeared. What makes this particularly ominous is that the harpooneer had prophesied that he must die and then reappear before Ahab could be killed. Instead of dwelling on this Macbeth -like riddle, Ahab soon finds himself rowing through a sea of ravenous sharks that, like the nutmeg grater, chew the blades of his oars into fragments.
    It all comes together like Fate’s well-oiled machine: Fedallah’s lifeless body appears among the snarl of harpoon lines crisscrossing the White Whale’s humped back; as Fedallah also predicted, Moby Dick then transforms the Pequod into a vast, American-built hearse when the whale bashes into her bow with his mammoth head. As the ship sinks into the sea, Ahab hurls his harpoon only to have the line wrap around his neck and whisk him to his death in the wake of the creature he despised above all else. Lastly, there is the Wampanoag harpooneer Tashtego at the masthead, valiantly fulfilling Ahab’s order to nail his bloodred flag to the top of the spar even as a savage sky hawk attempts to steal away the flag. The sky hawk’s wing becomes caught between the masthead and Tashtego’s hammer (one wonders whether Melville came up with this astonishing conclusion as he hammered away at his house that spring) and is pulled down with the Pequod, “which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”
    The chapter concludes by reaching back to Noah even as it anticipates America’s blood-soaked day of reckoning to come: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surfbeat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
    After the titanic fury of the final three chapters, the epilogue comes as an immense relief. Ishmael, it turns out, was the one who replaced Fedallah in Ahab’s whaleboat. Luckily, he and several others were tossed from the boat prior to the captain’s death and watched the final scene from the edges of the fray. Once the ship sank and the ensuing vortex began to drag all of them under, Queequeg’s coffin life buoy popped up out of the water, and Ishmael became the Pequod ’s only survivor. “Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.” Magically preserved in the predator-free zone of “The Grand Armada,” Ishmael is rescued by the Rachel, still in search of her captain’s missing son. This means that instead of elation, Ishmael brings only disappointment to his rescuers. “It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” And so Melville ends his masterpiece with a tender presentiment of his own abandonment by both his audience and the man to whom he would dedicate the novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

27
    Evil Art
    M elville had