Author Archives: Graciela Clavel

Final Essay

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Graciela Clavel

Professor Jessica Pressman

ECL 522

17 December 2025

Literature and Reality: Herman Melville and the Society that Refused to See Him

Herman Melville’s 19th century novel Moby Dick is a piece of social critique of its time that remained forgotten for decades. Melville did not live to see the revival and eventual canonization of his magnum opus, something that occurred in the post-modern period of England; the ‘Great American Novel’ was revived by the English at a time of Great War and loss. As Moby Dick mostly concerns itself with critiques on slavery, capitalism and tyranny this work did not catch the attention of its intended audience, an audience that was both entangled and responsible for the same critiques Melville writes about. In drawing from both the legacy of Moby Dick and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar”, it can be concluded that a troubled society will refuse to see its perpetuation of inequality even if it brings harm to their own lives. 

A quintessential piece of Moby Dick is the happenings upon the Pequod with the tyrannical leader Ahab and his subjects of undying loyalty. In these scenes throughout the novel, we are met with Ahab consciously putting the ship and its mates in existential danger for the sake of his personal obsession with killing the whale Moby Dick. These scenes are a microcosm of a larger critique that Melville makes with American society and its refusal to acknowledge the existential dangers of tyrannical leaders, something still remnant in the 21st century. While Melville poses Ahab under this lens of tyranny, there is a connection to be made between the futile attempts of total control from Ahab and human control over nature. Ahab’s famous line “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” (Melville 178) puts this into frame. Ahab’s obsession with control upon the Pequod can be felt in this single line. Ahab finds violence, that is his ‘strike’ against the sun, as a way to gain back control from nature and circumstances he cannot control. Ahab’s entire hunt for Moby Dick is shaped by violence as it is his method for control. Nature ‘insults’ Ahab when it makes him cognizant of his mortality and lack of control through his first confrontation with Moby Dick, leaving him without a leg. Violence is a way that people, especially tyrants, can feel a sense of control over the uncontrollable, that is the natural world. 

As Melville uses the ocean and its creatures to represent the fluidity and wildness of the natural world, there is also a connection between the wildness of humanity and people as a part of the natural world. This can be seen in the mirroring between the whale and man: “This man and this whale again came together, and one vanquished the other” (Melville 222). The man and the whale are represented as separate entities that come together through violence, leaving one ‘vanquished’. Yet, man and whale are part of the same wilderness that birthed them to life but through othering one another the man believes they are separate, and even one more superior than the other. This creates a hierarchy within nature of who has more power, and thus control. This is mirrored in American society’s racialized hierarchy of people, some are ‘othered’ and some have more ‘power’. Melville continuously uses his scenes upon the Pequod and with the whale to comment on the issues permeating America. 

Another aspect of American society that Melville integrates into his novel is capitalism and empire. As the narrator Ishmael defends the industry of whaling as one of respect, there is a point made that his labor contributes to the continuation of an empire, one of the largest in history, England. Ishamel defends whaling through the framing of upholding an empire: “Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whaleman supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!” (Melville 123). The whaleman is an individual who sees his work as important to those he will never meet or even live similarly to, that is the kings and queens. The whaleman and the king live on different ends of the economic spectrum, yet without the whaleman there is no coronation, no assurance of his reign and thus system surviving. Whaling is not for the benefit of the whaler, he may have little economic gain but it is nothing compared to the gain of the larger empire. Melville highlights how in oppressive systems the illusion and pride of individuality is sold to the masses to separate them from one another through the separation of a ‘ye’ and ‘we’, selling individuals the possibility of being closer to wealth than reality. The reality is that the whaler has more in common with the loyal Briton than the king on his coronation day. Capitalism depends on the ‘American Dream’, that is the hope that one day the individual will get their slice of the wealth in exchange for labor and oppression of himself, and in a time period of slavery, the belief in the oppression and abuse of others. 

This belief in comfort above all else is highlighted by Melville: “Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep” (Melville 139). Being ‘asleep’ means being ignorant of the exploitation of labor and bodies that enrich the kings and queens. Those who are asleep are kept dreaming, dreaming of wealth and a ‘great’ America that does not exist. Being awake is uncomfortable because it makes one conscious of the pain surrounding the comforts of life. Melville uses the epic of Moby Dick to call attention to this pain, something audiences of his time were not ready to face when reading this novel.

In the article “The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame”, author O.W. Reigel breaks down the reception of Moby Dick from the perspectives of both American and English audiences. Reigel highlights that while English audiences focused on the literary aspects of the novel, Americans were resistant to the novel as a whole. Reigel notes the “conservative American critics” (Reigel 202) as “being suspicious of blurb and exaggeration” (Reigel 202). Moby Dick flopped for decades under this guise. It was only under extreme circumstances of tyranny and war did audiences revive the novel and created a legacy that remains today. While Reigel notes what happened with American audiences upon the release of Moby Dick, Emerson offers perspective on the shortfalls that may have led to this novel initially being a flop.

Emerson’s “American Scholar” discusses the ways in which Americans should regard knowledge and experience when rising into scholarship. Emerson offers many pieces of advice, but one aspect in particular correlates with Moby Dick and its initial reception:

“For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society.”

Emerson does not believe that accepting what has come before and existed does not mean that it should always be this way. Melville creating Moby Dick was a way for American audiences to step away from the ‘treading the old road’ of racist and oppressive ideals. Emerson illuminates a path towards accepting and learning about the world for what it is rather than accepting what is given. Melville’s audiences rejected this novel during its time because individuals were not ready to come face to face with what their society was built upon. This statement is still true today and may be a continuous struggle for people in general. Melville still offers an opportunity to try anyways even if there is failure. Failure is essential to reading Moby Dick and rereading what we are told about the world and each other. 

Throughout this course, failure has been a state that many silently struggled with. As discussed in class, people are afraid to admit when they are struggling and we tend to blame ourselves when we do not understand something. In reading Moby Dick, we are exploring failure with Melville and the endless chapters that left us confused. While Emerson emphasises the individual and stepping away from the masses, something Melville highlights as well, there is importance in learning from one another to understand something like Moby Dick. Moby Dick teaches us that we cannot completely understand the world around us or control it, but this class also insists on working together to try to understand anyways. While this book took a while to be read under a different lens than its 19th century contemporaries, it is still an enigma that shows the reader different sides of the whale, and ourselves, each time. 

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” 1903. 

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1851. 

Riegel, O. W. “The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame.” American Literature, vol. 3, no. 2, 1931, pp. 195–203. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2919779. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.

Reflection on Moby Dick

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This class has been a huge learning experience for me that I would do again. I initially took this class because I saw Moby Dick as an important/constantly mentioned in pop culture and I wanted to see what it was all about. I am also ambitious and wanted to tell people I have read this book. Once class began, and the reading did too, I started to feel challenged by the ‘so-what’ push we have gotten all semester. I am used to reading something and liking it for aesthetic purposes, but I rarely questioned a line in a book and asked why it is important. This forced me to consider what I am reading in a larger context/include my own personal experience. But as the semester went on I really enjoyed making connections to the real world from a 1 or 2 sentence line, it forced me to think really deeply about single words.

Another thing that stands out to me is the class discussions that we would have. This would be an initial point of insecurity in the beginning of the class, I took it as an indicator that I was not ‘understanding’ the book in the same way other people did. But this was another thing that I had to shift my thinking about. These discussions pointed out so many amazing parts of this book that would reshape the way I initially read some parts. The sharing of interpretation was also helpful when I was genuinely confused in certain chapters. Overall I really liked taking this class and it taught me new ways to approach reading, thinking about literature and about feeling lost/confused when reading a book.

Moby Dick Holds a Mirror Up

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The criticism that was given towards Melville’s works differed by country, with English critics focusing on Melville’s stylistic choices while American critics rejected much more aspects of his works. I thought this was so interesting in relation to the hype Moby Dick gets as being the ‘Great American Novel’. There is definitely pride nowadays in Moby Dick and the fact it centers America, even if it is a critique on the events happening during Melville’s time. 

It was also interesting to think about why certain works are popular and valued during certain time periods, obviously Melville was critiquing much of the way the United States functioned, e.g. slavery, amongst his critiques against capitalism and tyranny. It makes sense that people did not like it at this time because it was not something most people were willing to see about their own society and taking accountability for their roles in perpetuating everything Melville critiques. In reading this week’s readings, I definitely got the impression that literature is reflective of people and it’s important to ask ourselves what types of literature, or in a modern sense media, is being popularized and valued. More importantly, it’s important to ask ourselves what types of works are being ignored or hated, is it because people cannot admit that they see themselves in the things being called out?  It’s not an easy ask for people to do, but after taking this class and learning about the journey of Moby Dick going from an ignored novel to a masterpiece I think it’s essential to question what we see when we consume popular literature/media today and what we see when we come across ignored works. 

Thinking about the final

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For my final project, I wanna piece together the thoughts I had throughout the semester so it ties together towards a bigger statement about this book/why its important and still is. I will go through my old blog posts/essays to get some ideas, but i definitely want to focus on Moby Dick and how its messages from the 1800s are super relevant today. I wanna stick to a more modern lens/interpretation with this book in my essay.

That’s all I really have so far right now, I honestly get my ideas while I am writing so once I start with a thesis I’ll hopefully have more details to post about!

Short Essay 2

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Herman Melville’s whale exists as a contradiction, a face of human fallacy. Melville writes the whale as a being that changes face depending on who is looking, something felt in Chapter 100 ‘Leg and Arm’. Melville repositions the whale’s demeanor in this scene, “So what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness.” In just one sentence, Melville rewrites the whale not as the overarching villain in a human story, but as a victim in a story of human error. For nearly the entire novel, there is an attempt to understand a multifaceted creature under the human lens of binary, binary that is shaped by our language. This sentence is a microcosm of Melville’s book, an ask of the reader to step out of the binary of language and read the multifaceted whale differently. In asking his readers to read outside of binary, Melville offers a hope that the reader will reread their society, and its humans, with a much fuller and forgiving scope. 

In this repositioning, there exists a whale who is both violent and innocent, a creature of contradiction. Ahab sees the whale as a singular creature whose entire existence is ‘malice’, a personification of the violence that was done onto Ahab. In this passage, alternative voices attempt to enter Ahab’s narrative to rewrite the scene of violence that left Ahab without a leg. The White Whale is rebranded as ‘awkward’, an intentional word choice that invokes a feeling of innocence. In choosing to rewrite the whale as ‘awkward’, Melville creates a new narrative of a being that does not understand its own strength, naive of its ability to do violence. The whale is awkward, unnatural to behavioral implications of largeness. The whale is large but docile, yet any action of violence, even in self-defense, perpetuates the narrative of binary thinking that encloses the largeness of the whale. This whale does not know the binary, the binary is a human invention in an attempt to delegate the natural world into neat systems. Ahab’s whale is not malicious or defenseless, it is ‘awkward’ in its coexistence of largeness and meekness, enveloping multiple truths.

By rereading the whale as ‘awkward’, Melville takes the reader outside of the binary. This in itself is challenging the nature of language, which is ultimately shaped by binary oppositions. As language fails to obviously display Melville’s challenge, it is up to the reader to make these connections as Ishamel tries chapter after chapter to define the multifaceted through binary thinking, serving as an allegory of human failure to define nature. Melville asks the reader to be ‘awkward’ in our understanding of the world, to embody the contradictions and queerness of nature. Under the binary lens of nature, the whale is queer in its continuous refusal to have a singular definition or to be defined solely in opposition to another. Ahab’s inability to see the whale as anything but the singular definition of ‘malice’ leaves out a completely new experience of the whale, one that ultimately is detrimental to both parties. 

Ahab’s relationship with the whale is representative of the social consequences on land for individuals who represent the queer and multifaceted. As Ahab already has his own story of the whale’s nature. Shed in a singular negative light, the whale faces the real life consequences of Ahab’s miseducation. This is translated on land through images of prejudice where Melville writes from, while simultaneously remaining contemporary. Not only is the whale suffering from Ahab’s inability to see its multiple faces, Ahab is putting himself and others in dangerous positions driven by his misunderstanding. The whale is ‘othered’, parallel to humans who fail at resembling the narrative of whiteness in a binary society. Those who are not on one side of the binary fall onto the side of the ‘other’, white vs. black and good vs. evil, it is binaries that invoke a sense of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Melville uses the multitude of the whale to depict the contradictions that coexist in humans, the wavy nature of queerness that finds its way onto binary land. The whale reaps the consequences of queerness in this narrative, but Ahab also loses something too. Ahab loses the ability to connect with something beyond his realm of knowledge, choosing ignorance rather than accepting he does not know everything. Knowledge is power for Ahab, and in believing he knows the whale and its ‘malice’, he loses out on his own life, opting instead to chase a fictional beast. 

The whale is the embodiment of multitude, Ahab chooses to ‘take’ a singular face of the whale, owning a piece of it. In ‘taking’ the whale’s malice, as Melville writes it, there is this sense of ownership through the belief of knowing the whale’s true nature. Ahab believes he is smarter than the whale is. Knowledge is Ahab’s ultimate power over the whale and it is also where he is mistaken. To know is to understand, yet Ahab knows nothing, he ‘takes’ what he wants from the whale without regarding anything else. He ‘takes’ what fits into the narrative he writes. In believing in his own intelligence and its deficiency in the whale, Ahab assumes he has a right to destroy the whale by pure reason; reason given by knowing the whale better than it knows itself. The whale is a dumb creature, violent and large, fitting the binary that embodies the parts of nature we cannot control, therefore naming it the ‘other’ and assigning the negative traits from that side of the binary. The whale knows nothing, and knowledge is the medium that Ahab uses in his narrative to defend his actions. 

Melville’s entire novel can be read from a multitude of perspectives, something that is carried in Chapter 100 with the questioning the narrative presented thus far. For a majority of the novel, we are trapped on Ahab’s ship and his narrative, nearly believing his version of the whale ourselves. Melville brings us back from that cusp with the simple inclusion of reframing what Ahab thinks he knows, and by extension what the reader knows. By first introducing us to the whale’s singular face of ‘malice’ via Ahab’s narrative, there is this transition beyond the individual experience in Chapter 100, an understanding that a singular experience cannot be read as the entirety of the whale, a creature our language alone cannot define. The whale is queer, is the ‘other’ that we fail to understand on land; Chapter 100 begs us to ask something differently, outside of the binary we have learned to see the world in. Melville asks us to unlearn the restrictions we put on one another, and by extension our own selves as well. 

Sense and Insensibility

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Moby Dick is a novel about the insensible, especially that of Ahab in his chase for the whale. His insensibility goes as far as putting his crew and his own life in danger, going against his own human instinct for survival. Melville writes of sensibility in Chapter 121 through a conversation between Stubb and Flask, concluding with a statement about sensibility as a choice, “Why don’t ye be sensible, Flask? It’s easy to be sensible; why don’t ye, then? Any man with half an eye can be sensible.” (pg. 555). By including this very popular sentiment in the backdrop of Ahab’s insensibility, Melville brings into question the irrationality of ration. Humans are not intrinsically born with ‘sensibility’, it is gained through our interactions with established rules of sensibility, of what is right or wrong. Our belief in human sensibility is taken for granted, pointed out by Melville using the voice of Stubb. Sensibility is a human construct, one that gets jumbled at sea away from the established rules on land. The insensible becomes sensible on Ahab’s ship, and because the construct of sensibility is not questioned by the shipmates, they too aid in their own destruction by following in Ahab’s insensibility, believing that those who establish rules must be the most sensible.

Authority goes hand in hand with knowledge, knowledge is knowing what is ‘sensibile’. Stubb refers to being sensible as ‘easy’, easy in adhering to the rules of the establishment. By saying being sensible is ‘easy’, Melville critiques the ease in which humans believe in the rules created by those who get to decide; easy is not having to decide at all, easy is not having to think at all. Melville continues his critique of sensibility with Stubb’s shame of the insensible, that it is somehow in their deficiency that they cannot be sensible, noting that anyone with ‘half an eye’ can easily do this. By specifically referring to the act of seeing what is sensible, there is a reference to the blindness of the masses in seeing the corruption/insensibility that happens right in front of their eyes. Stubb shames Flask by bringing up a deficiency in those who are deemed ‘insensible’, further prompting the cycle of ease in following the establishment rather than being shamed for opening your eyes to what is truly going on. 

But what do I know?

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In Chapter 100 ‘Leg and Arm’, a juxtaposition is made between Ahab’s whale versus another ship’s version, “So what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness.” Ahab’s knowledge of the whale is isolated, purposefully, so that no other explanation can penetrate his mind about the creature. In posing the whale as a being without a grand plan, Melville rewrites this entire story in just a sentence, the whale becoming a victim of circumstance rather than a violent perpetrator. Melville also uses Ahab’s intentional ignorance to emphasize the multifaceted nature of knowledge, exemplifying his failure to understand the whale as a complicated creature instead of a monster. 

When the whale’s ‘malice’ is exchanged for ‘awkwardness’, this prompts images of innocence and inexperience. The whale is not by nature violent, but when attacked it is forced to defend itself by means outside of its nature, its violence is unnatural and awkward. In rewriting the whale as a docile being, biting Ahab’s leg to save its own life, the whale is able to exist as multiple things, violent and awkward. Ahab does not want to actually know the whale, he has already written his narrative and has his perfect ending for it. Knowledge requires the will to be proven wrong, something Ahab refuses to do, resulting in his struggle against a villain that doesn’t exist. This struggle puts not only himself, but also those around him in danger for a vain pursuit. In just a sentence, Melville offers much on the way we see the world, and the choice we have in this perspective, its consequences affecting more than our own selves. 

The Voiceless Whale

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In Chapter 85 ‘The Fountain’, the whale becomes voiceless, deemed as such through the human lens of Ishamel. In this claim, Ishamel asserts the importance of the voice “Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.” Those without a voice are unable to function within a society that aims to exploit, and the whale exemplifies what happens to those who cannot be  translated into such a society, people whose voices go ignored or misunderstood. The whale exists outside of words, a ‘profound being’ that Ishamel himself struggles to understand through words. Yet, a voice is situational in both Melville’s and the modern world we live in, those with the right privileges and history are heard, their voice and language is the norm. Melville uses the whale, a being who cannot communicate in the way humans do, to be representative of the masses all over the world with voices unheard, ignored or like the whale, untranslatable to the capitalist perspective of the whaler. 

The whale cannot be ‘forced to stammer’ its defense in living, and as consequence its body becomes a product, killed and sold to those who can speak, reflecting the scenes of U.S. history. The body as a product becomes systemically true with slavery, and there was no chance of defense if already deemed voiceless, like the whale is. The body as a product is also significant in a modern society, Ishmael notes this himself as the defense that the whale fails to make is for the purpose of ‘getting a living.’ These last few words serve a double purpose, in the case of the whale ‘getting a living’ can mean being allowed to live, but this is also translated on land with the working class as their bodies are used to make a living, a living that is unfair and does not value their lives in the same way as those demanding them to speak. ‘Getting a living’ does not mean much for Melville, for even those who speak their defense are half heard and not given much. 

Essay 1: The Stuff of Kings and Queens

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In Chapter 25 ‘Post Script’, Ishamel argues for the imperial status of his career “Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whaleman supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!” In this scene, the suppliers are the essential component to ensure the hierarchy of England survives onto its next leader, calling the attention of the loyalists to truly understand the necessity and distinction of the whaleman in sustaining the empire. In this empire, the capturing and commodification of the whale mirrors an essential scene of colonialism; that is the capture, sale and murder of Africans and Indigenous peoples throughout the world for growth and propagation of empires. In taking the whaleman all the way up to the kings and queens of England, where once the sun never set on its empire, Melville makes this connection of whaling to a larger context of colonial superpowers exploiting lands (oceans) and bodies (whales) that are not their own for the capital gain of kings and queens, individuals who will never step foot on both whaleships or slave ships. The whaler represents the systems (racism, capitalism, colonialism) that kept empires such as England and eventually the United States thriving at the expense of brown and black bodies. In a more modern context, the whaleman is a system of institutional and ideological barriers that warrant the economic disparity between the people (whales) and 1% (kings and queens). The whales are the stuff that ensure a coronation takes place, but not without the whaleman delivering.

The whaleman represents many different ideas throughout the novel, but Chapter 25 captures the whaleman in a specific light, one of pride in his position in the civilized world. The whaleman is an individual who sees his work as important to those he will never meet or even live similarly to, that is the kings and queens. The whaleman and the king live on different ends of the economic spectrum, yet without the whaleman there is no coronation, no assurance of his reign and thus system surviving. Whaling is not for the benefit of the whaler, he may have little economic gain but it is nothing compared to the gain of the larger empire. Whaling is impossible with just a single individual, it takes many individuals to be convinced that their position is prideful for the system of whaling to be a successful one. Ishamel is prideful in his declaration and asserts his identity to the system of whaling through the use of ‘ye’ and ‘we’, ‘we’ becomes the larger, shared identity of the whaler and ‘ye’ is everyone else, including the reader. Through this shared identity of whaling and separation from those who do not, Ishamel exemplifies the ways in which exploitative systems survive beyond the benefit of the individual. The ‘individual’ whaler whose labor upholds the industry is being sold this idea of pride in the system where the economic disparity between him and the king is immense, seeing himself as being less close to the loyal Britons than the King on his coronation day, for it was him that supplied the stuff and not those Britons. Through this intentional contrast, Melville highlights how in oppressive systems the illusion and pride of individuality is sold to the masses to separate them from one another, rather selling them the possibility of being closer to wealth than reality. The reality is that the whaler has more in common with the loyal Briton than the king on his coronation day. 

Another aspect of whaling asks that whales are captured and stripped for parts in their own home, parts that are used by kings and queens as well as dispersed throughout the ‘civilized’ world to those who can afford its product. Through the similar ideology and imagery, whaling mirrors the events that precede and continuously trail a colonial superpower, that is events of mass murder, slavery and exploitation of both body and land. The whaleman is who captures, murders and sells the whale, the whaleman is who feeds the empire through his violence. The whaleman is an ideology of racism, capitalism and colonialism. In deeming the whale an evil creature, in othering the whale into something completely alien rather than a being deserving of dignity, the whaleman leaps past the barrier of empathy that makes violence difficult to enact. Empires, and the actual people who crossed the oceans seeking to exploit, must deem the people and lands alien in the same sense the whaler does to the whale. The Africans and Indigenous are othered in order to capture their bodies and their homes, Melville’s whale is a microcosm of this ideology and history. The whaler also seeks economic gain, selling the whale over and over again, its body becoming an economic concept rather than a part of the natural world. The whale cannot be understood, or ignorantly believed to be, by the whaler. The whale is translated in strictly economic terms. In Ishamel’s defense, the whale is even sold to the king and queen, for it is used in the passing on of kingdomhood, keeping the exploitative system untouched. 

Melville picks at the concept of a colonial empire through exemplifying one of the most famous in Chapter 25. Colonial empires cannot be built without racism and the exploitation of indigenous peoples and lands. The ideology of the whaleman is the core of colonial empires, and the whaleman is who supplies the product for the coronation of the kings and queens. While Ishmael explains many reasons why he is prideful in his occupation, there is a double entendre to his statement in Chapter 25 that Melville pokes at. The whaler has the ideology necessary to live in a system that capitalizes, murders and exploits bodies, ranging from human to whale. The whaler upholds his position himself through a delusion of pride, pride that it is him that supplies for the coronation, that it is him who upholds the colonial empire that exploits him too without him realizing. In this sense, Melville critiques the colonial empire for not only its actions abroad but those at home. The colonial empire sells a belief, one that countless whalers buy to be able to function in the empire. 

Elijah is a whistleblower!

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As we enter the miniature world of the Pequod, Ishamel is overcome with an internal struggle about his future and the uncertainty of his fate if he steps foot on the ship, exemplifying  how far humans can delude themselves when they know something is not right, even with red flags right in front of them. Ishamel is confronted by the ‘prophet’ Elijah who warns him not to go aboard the Pequod with Captain Ahab, described as a tyrant who demands that one “must jump when he gives an order.” Ishmael does not believe the warning signs, Elijah is a whistleblower of the Pequod, knowing from his own experience what Ishmael will go through. Elijah represents the countless whistleblowers throughout history who have risked their lives to undermine the authority that threatens all, and in this same pattern his image is tarnished, others gaslighted into believing he is mentally unstable, although this is mainly due to Ishmael’s own judgement, calling Elijah a “crazy man”. After Elijah’s physical exit, Ishmael describes the uncertainty he feels in the next chapter, noting “If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it,…But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.” This describes a social experience that has occurred throughout different authoritative regimes, the belief in the ‘good life’ at the expense of all else, ignoring the treading across thinning lines that occur right before one’s eyes. Ishamel knows something is not right in the voyage he just committed to, he has a stake in the Pequod and it may be from pride or ignorance that he refuses to acknowledge both the bad signs that appear in front of him or his own internal suspicion. He actively lies to himself, making excuses like Elijah’s state of health making his claims unrooted. Humans have this unique ability to lie when they know something is not right, because being wrong puts everything at stake, and it demands that the life we know must change, that we ourselves may have done something wrong in the process. In the contemporary age of dictators, Moby Dick peels back the psyche of humans who have voted against their own rights, but the ship has already sailed before one can finally be honest.