Moby Dick: Man Versus Forces Greater Than Himself

I first read Moby Dick as a senior in high school. I cannot remember if we read selected chapters (which is quite possible to do without losing the thread of the narrative), or if we read the whole baggy, shaggy novel in its entirety. I do remember, against all odds and contrary to the general opinion of my class, that I liked it.

Reading it now, I can see why the book continues to be assigned in high school and college. It’s a wonderful teaching novel, densely packed with high falutin’, dare I say Shakespearean, speeches ringing with SAT words and every manner of literary device. You want great examples of foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism (my God, the symbolism!), point of view, setting, allegory? Melville is your man.

I enjoyed the book in high school because the story fell into place like pieces in a puzzle. Logically, the book held together. All of the clues lead somewhere. The foreshadowing did not disappoint; the imagery, much of it Biblical, was straightforward and easily researched; and my cache of new vocabulary words was downright impressive.

Reading the novel as a middle-aged adult is a different experience. I don’t think I realized when I read it as a teenager that the book is quite funny. Ishmael, our dutiful narrator, is something of a clown. Melville, it seems, was having quite a bit of fun writing Ishmael. He sets the tone right from the famous first paragraph, which starts off seriously enough and quickly becomes silly:

“Whenever I find myself going grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily passing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong and moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

The opening chapters of Moby Dick are delightful. Ishmael wanders into New Bedford, Massachusetts, finds a room and the dark and mysterious Spouter Inn, and meets his new bosom buddy Queequeg, a tattooed cannibal complete with harpoon and tomahawk pipe. The two of them have a few adventures on land that would not be out of place in a Will Ferrell movie. They eventually board a Nantucket boat called the Pequod, a floating coffin if you heed your foreshadowing and imagery, and go a-whaling.

My edition of Moby Dick, a Penguin paperback with a very good introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick, runs 600 pages. The argument could be made, and no doubt has been made by countless beleaguered high school and college students, that this story could adequately be told in a book half that length. Once Ishmael and Queequeg push off from dry land, Moby Dick, much like the single-minded voyage of which it tells, grows long and disjointed and delightfully weird.

Accounts of spotting and killing whales and of meeting up with other whaling boats at sea are broken up by Wikipedia-like passages on various aspects of whales and whaling. Melville clearly spent some time at sea. I’m sure I must have skipped over, or at least skimmed, many of these passages back in high school.

This time around, however, I read every one with great interest. Here was Ishmael at his clownish best, posing as a great authority, yet citing odd sources and freely spinning fact and conjecture into a froth of verbal didacticism that surely and tragically would have been edited out of any novel written today.

It’s not until several days into the voyage, when it is far too late for anyone to turn back, that we meet Captain Ahab. Ahab is mad. That is clear from the moment Ishmael claps eyes on him, and he only gets madder as the story progresses. Moby Dick, the great white whale, has taken off his leg (dismasted him, as they say in the book), and Ahab wants revenge. The Pequod is on a suicide mission with spooky Ahab at its helm.

It’s no wonder Ishmael banters on about flensing and sperm oil and the history of whaling. He needs something to distract him from the dark charisma of his captain.

A few days after I graduated from college, I moved out to Portland, Ore., and took a series of jobs in the mental health system. Among other things, I worked the graveyard shift at a group home for mentally ill folks just released from the recently closed Dammasch State Hospital (of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame).

Most of the people living in the group home were actively psychotic. They heard things I didn’t hear; saw things I didn’t see. If they skipped their meds, all hell broke loose inside their brains. They wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t listen to reason. They were trapped inside their heads. Often, they’d convince themselves that they were God or the Devil, or some sort of divine puppet controlled by God or the Devil.

This, my friends, is Ahab. Melville knew madness.

I was young and, of course, fascinated by all of this. I would sit for hours through the night listening to fantastic tales of doves flying out of hearts, of prophesies, of voices directing every thought and move. Never once did I try to persuade the speaker that he or she might not be making sense. These stories were too good, and the tellers only too happy for a listener. I loved this job.

Having since experienced a baby version of this madness myself (in my case, a particularly nasty case of post-partum depression that lasted a year and landed me in the emergency room sleepless and shaking and practically raving), I wish I could go back and sit with those people again.

How, I wondered over and over during my own ordeal, did those guys live like this every day with no hope of reprieve? How did they get up every morning and live?  I would apologize for romanticizing their illness and for failing to take into account the soul-sucking pain.

Melville feels Ahab’s pain. Ahab knows he’s mad. He says as much during his many mutterings to himself as he paces the deck night after night in his monomaniacal quest for revenge on Moby Dick. In a particularly rousing speech that goes on for a full chapter (see Gregory Peck’s performance in the 1956 film for a glimpse of it’s power), he works his whole crew into a lather of crazy support. These people have pledged their lives to a mad captain who sees signs and prophesies everywhere, and who feels himself to be divinely (devilishly?) appointed to slay the white whale. Ahab, in a word, is possessed.

Time and again, the Pequod comes across other Nantucket whaling boats out on the vast ocean. Ahab’s only question for their captains is, “Hast seen the white whale?” We are told story after story of limbs lost and men carried down to the watery depths. None of these survivors wants anything further to do with Moby Dick. Ahab is alone in his quest. Because Ahab, of course, is mad.

But his speeches are wonderful. Read them slowly and savor them. Among my favorites is this gem. Ahab is alone on deck pondering the severed head of a whale slain that very day:

“Speak, thou vast and venerable head … which, though ungarnished by a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down…. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murders still sailed on unharmed --- while swift lightenings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous hand to outstretched, longing arms. O head! Thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”

Oh, I could jabber on for days about this book. It’s packed with such wonderful stuff. During the three or so weeks I was reading it, Moby Dick took over my life. I felt like I was stuck on that Pequod with the crew, in for the long haul, out of sight of land and the comforts of home. I felt unfit for the world and useless in polite society. I annoyed my family by staring them down unexpectedly and hissing, “Hast seen the white whale?”

“Mom!” the kids would whine, “Stop saying that!”

The story itself is archetypal. It can be found anywhere: Shakespeare, the Bible, Frankenstein, James Bond. It’s man versus nature, man versus God, indeed man versus his own creation of nature or God or whatever force in the wide world he finds more powerful than himself (herself, too!): Ahab versus the white whale.

The story, really, belongs to Ahab. Melville uses him sparingly (there is only so much a reader can take of his blinding intensity) and to great effect. We are all along for the ride, and we all, save Ishmael, cannot help ourselves. We all go down with the ship.