Class 522

Dr. Jessica Pressman

Nov. 16, 2025

The Immortal Mystery of Fadlallah: Time, Symbolism, and the Measure of Obsession in

Moby-Dick

In Chapter 73 of Moby-Dick, Stubb offers a strange remark about Fedallah, the enigmatic Parsee who serves as Captain Ahab’s shadow and spiritual double: “‘Do you see that mainmast there?’ pointing to the ship ‘well that’s the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold and string ‘em along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do ye see; well, that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. No, all the coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts enough’” (356).  At first glance, the line reads like another piece of Stubb’s humor–hyperbolic, riddling, and absurdly nautical. Yet beneath the surface, Melville loads the passage with meaning about time, immortality, and the inscrutable forces that drive men to destruction. This quote concerns Stubb’s comic attempt to measure Fedallah’s supposed agelessness. This passage involves Melville’s intricate use of shipboard imagery, numerical metaphor, and grotesque exaggeration to suggest that Fedallah transcends ordinary human temporality. Melville transforms Fedallah from a mere harpoon into a symbol of the eternal, demonic energy propelling Ahab’s quest reminder that obsession and fate operate beyond human scales of time or understanding.

  Stubb’s description turns the Pequod’s mast and its cargo of casks into instruments of impossible calculation. The author invites the listener to imagine using the ship’s mainmast as a figure one, then stringing together all the hoops from the barrels in the hold as zeros—forming a number so large it could never represent Fedallah’s true age. Within the literal conversation, Stubb is jesting with his crewmates, turning Fedallah’s strange silence and foreignness into material for dark humor. Fedallah is already a source of superstition among the sailors, who see him as spectral and uncanny; Stubb’s exaggeration that he is older than arithmetic itself extends into myth. The image of endless hoops recalls the circular nature of time and labor aboard the whaling ship. The coopers, who make and repair barrels, represent the endless repetition of maritime life—hoop after hoop, voyage after voyage, sealing whale oil inside containers that in turn fuel the world’s machines. By claiming that even “all the coopers in creation” (Melville,) could not make enough hoops to measure Fedallah’s age, Stubb inadvertently admits that Fedallah belongs to a realm outside human industry and progress. His age cannot be “made” or “counted.” In the passage, it is clear the sailor attempts to define the indefinite, but the hyperbole invites the reader to see Fedallah not as mortal, but as a timeless force whose origins preceded the Pequod, its crew, and perhaps even humanity itself.

Melville constructs the line with layered imagery that transforms ordinary shipboard materials into symbols of cosmic proportion. The mast is the ship’s spine, its center of balance, and in this paragraph, it functions as the axis of measurement against which Fedallah’s inhuman longevity is compared. By pairing the mast with “hoops” from the hold, Melville juxtaposes the linear with the circular: the vertical aspiration of the mast against the cyclical repetition of the hoops. Together they evoke the twin structures of time—linearity and recurrence—neither of which can contain Fedallah. Melville’s diction also reveals how humor masks dread. The rustic slang, “coopers in creation”, and the rhythm of Stubb’s speech maintain his usual tone of comic disbelief, yet the joke betrays anxiety. Stubb, though genial, is disturbed by Fedallah’s eerie stillness and nocturnal presence on deck. Humor becomes his defense against fear. This can occur when we think about something that is going to happen in our life, and that event really takes place maybe by chance, just like Ahab’s feelings regarding his spear, expecting that he is going to hunt the whale, and he really hunts the whale. Even if it happens by chance, it gives us great symbolic that we may achieve successful jobs in our life. Fedallah’s unmeasurable age thus connects him to mythic eternity. Furthermore, the language of manufacture and measurement (“coopers,” “hoops,” “oughts”) underscores Melville’s critique of industrial rationality. The men aboard the Pequod are creatures of the whaling economy, trained to quantify and contain nature’s excess—the oil of leviathans turned into barrels, numbers, and profit. Fedallah, however, refuses containment. The more the sailors attempt to quantify him, the more he eludes measurement. In that sense, Melville uses the idiom of maritime commerce to stage the limits of human reason in the face of metaphysical mystery. What matters to us is we should be very patient when we miss a chance or failure then we shouldn’t give up at all, but we should try our best another time so that we can be able to achieve our goal in life and learn from our failure.

The deeper significance of this passage lies in how it situates Fedallah as the symbolic counterpoint to Ahab’s temporal humanity. If Fedallah’s age exceeds all possible human reckoning, he becomes the embodiment of fate, the eternal principle of destruction that Ahab mistakes for personal will. To say that Fedallah is older than all the hoops ever made is to say that Ahab’s madness is not new, it is part of an ancient cycle of pride and retribution repeating across ages. By this point in the novel, Fedallah has already emerged as a figure of prophetic fatalism. His cryptic predictions later in the text confirm that he functions less as a man than as an oracle or daemon. The sailors’ jokes about his immortality foreshadow his role as the unearthly witness of Ahab’s doom. The unending “hoops” represent the cyclical nature of Ahab’s obsession: each attempt to master the whale only tightens the loop of his bondage. Fedallah’s immeasurable age mirrors the timeless recurrence of obsession itself—how humanity perpetually rebuilds its own prisons of ambition and revenge. On a broader scale, the passage reveals Melville’s philosophical meditation on time and meaning. The Pequod’s voyage is a microcosm of human history, violence, and spiritual blindness. Stubb’s playful arithmetic, turning barrels into zeros, exposes the absurdity of trying to quantify what is infinite. In that absurdity lies Melville’s warning: human reason, commerce, and even faith collapse before the immensity of existence. To laugh at Fedallah’s age is to mock our own ignorance of time and mortality.

Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty ship, and outward-bound”

In Chapter 115 of Moby-Dick where Ahab looks at the Bachelor, a ship completely loaded with oil, practically bursting at the seams with profit, and basically says, “Good for you. But me? I’m an empty ship heading the other way.” That line was very impactful to me.

The Bachelor is the picture of success in the whaling world: tons of oil, minimal losses, a crew ready to celebrate. By those standards alone, they’ve crushed it. Meanwhile, the Pequod has been killing whales too; the ship literally has product in the hold. But because none of it is that whale, the only one Ahab cares about, he just calls the whole thing empty. Not lacking… empty. Like nothing they’ve done matters at all.

This is where the book quietly slides into something that feels very modern. Ahab basically throws out the entire industry’s definition of success and replaces it with one of his own. And that’s something we see all the time: institutions or leaders who reframe the goals so that whatever you’ve achieved still somehow “isn’t it.” You hit quotas, but they weren’t the right quotas. You met expectations, but the expectations have now shifted. The finish line moves, and suddenly you’re back to zero.

What makes Ahab interesting is that he knows he can’t say this out loud too bluntly. He needs the crew to see him as focused—but not unhinged. If the Pequod actually came close to matching the Bachelor’s overflowing success, it would force the question the crew keeps nudging around: why are we still out here? Why not go home? Too much normal success would expose the abnormal mission.

So Ahab shrinks the definition of “success” until only his obsession fits inside it. The ship isn’t empty in any tangible way; it’s empty because he says it is. And once the person in power gets to decide what counts, everyone else becomes responsible for chasing something they can never actually catch.

“It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; the, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if fat over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns” (P.539).In Chapter 116, page 539 of Moby-Dick, the passage captures the quiet end of a violent hunt, when both the sun and the whale “stilly died together.” The scene shifts from action to stillness, marking the close of day and the crew’s return from their labor at sea. Melville uses rich, poetic imagery “crimson fight,” “rosy air,” and “vesper hymns” to transform the bloody battle of whaling into something almost spiritual. The blending of death and beauty creates a paradoxical calm, as if nature itself pauses to mourn and pray. This moment reveals hoe the whalers’ brutal world is still bound to natural rhythms of life and death. The sea becomes both a trave and a cathedral, merging violence with reverence, It reminds readers that even amid human destruction, there exists a strange harmony an uneasy peace between man, nature, and the setting sun.

In Chapter 118, “The Quadrant,” Melville shows one of Ahab’s most rebellious moments: when he destroys his quadrant, the tool that has helped him navigate the seas. What starts as a routine check of the sun quickly turns into an angry rejection of everything the quadrant stands for: truth, measurement, and accepting nature’s rules. The scene starts quietly, with Ahab looking up at the “high and mighty Pilot” above, but soon he launches into a furious speech. “Thou tellest me truly where I am—but canst thou tell me where I shall be?” (p. 544). At this point, he is no longer talking to the quadrant. He is speaking to the sun, to God, and to the universe that will not answer him.

What stands out here is that Ahab’s anger is not really about the tool, but about what it stands for. The quadrant can tell him his location, but it cannot explain why he is there. It gives him facts, not meaning. Ahab feels insulted by this and curses the quadrant. In his anger, he stomps on it. It is like he is rejecting not just science, but the whole idea that anything outside himself can define what is real. For Ahab, the sun does not light his way anymore; it blinds him. Knowledge does not set him free; it only mocks him.

When Ahab smashes the quadrant, he is fighting against the order of the universe itself. He will not let anything measure, guide, or limit him, not the stars, not God, not even the truth. In this moment, Melville makes Ahab a symbol of human pride: someone so obsessed with control that he destroys the very things that could have kept him safe.