Category Archives: Week 8: Chapters 28-36

Isolation on the Pequod

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Chapter 35, The Mast-Head, offers a lot of substance on the theme of isolation. Ishmael brings the reader in, even dropping the reader into the narrative, referencing the reader to be thee with him while telling the story, “There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep…” (Melville, 169) The reader is now in the story while it’s being played out and drags you into the isolating experience it is to be on a ship. Melville also uses the stylistic choice of asyndetons to drag on the feeling of separation from the outside world. As if time stood still.

“There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing… For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks…” (Melville, 169)

Ishmael is reinforcing the idea of isolation on the whaling ship, and not necessarily in a negative way but rather in a positive calming way. And although they are separated from the world they aren’t alone but rather forced to a life of zero privacy. Their entire world has become the Pequod.

A ship controlled by vengeance

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Captain Ahab’s own quest for vengeance has seeped it’s way into the minds of the rest of the crew members, deepening their own hatred for Moby Dick and further showing the influence that Ahab has over the men in the Pequod. The beginning of Chapter 41 offers us more insight into the feelings of animosity that the crew members of the Pequod are feeling towards Moby Dick: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge” (Melville 194). Moby Dick takes up the mind of both Ahab and all his men on board the ship, consuming them in the feeling of vengeance. Ahab’s own personal quarrel with Moby Dick has managed to become everyone’s problem, with Ishmael claiming that he and the rest of the crew have taken an oath of “violence and revenge” against the whale, not stopping at anything to get their way.

This shows how influential Captain Ahab is. We have already been introduced to him as an almost mythical-like character, one that cannot be defined in anyway you would a normal person. His own need for revenge has became a need for everyone on the Pequod, and his ability to influence his men is astounding. Ahab is such a larger-than-life character, it is no surprise that many of the men fall into the trap of listening to his orders and hearing his stories which purpose is to fill them with anger. It is certainly interesting to see the character Ahab, especially today where we see a lot of similarities with many prominent figures in America.

It’ll be interesting to see how far Ahab is able to go with influencing the crew members of the Pequod, and how far they willing to listen and feel the same anger and need for vengeance that he does. In their minds, Moby Dick is the cause of all their pain and suffering.

Ravaged and Plundered

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In chapter 35 when describing the languidness induced by the mast-head Melville brings up an interesting word: Pantheist. Pantheist, meaning someone who believes that God is identical with the universe or nature. Immediately I was drawn towards the characterization of Ahab. One who is described as god-like and numerously referenced through the lens of nature: “a maned sea lion, last of the grisly bears, leader of a pack of wolves” etc. He is this pantheistic god-like piece of nature. But in his rallying speech of hate he cries out “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” He hates the whale, and he hates nature. But, he is nature. He hates himself, hates what he has become: a beast, a “pegging lubber”. Turned into a beast by a beast. And what a beast it is: “white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and crooked jaw… three holes punctured in his starboard fluke… and corkscrewed harpoons lie twisted and wrenched in him.” The whale sounds demonic. But it is a true representation of industrialized nature. A beautiful creature that has been ravaged by the need to fuel our fiendish industry. Staked and plundered. And more than a representation of nature, the whale is also a representation of another demonic white beast. One that has taken away mobility and freedom from a group of people as Moby Dick has taken mobility away from Ahab. This frenzied quest of a boat full of savages, “noble savages”, and northern men chasing this “white-headed”, seemingly immortal whale is Melville’s representation of a war against slavery. It is a premonition of the looming civil war. Is it backwards to say then, that the hate in Ahab’s heart is a warning against the hatred of the other or the monsters society creates? Perhaps it is a warning to slave owners, of the hate that grows in the heart of the cruelly treated and the vengeance that they will exact.

Narrative Perspective and Stage Performance

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This part of the novel has so many moments that made me question exactly who is in charge of the narrative and how it functions for plot and character development. Specifically, how the description of characters, actions, and scenes works as a plot device to paint the happenings of the Pequod as a much larger thing. One of the first moments and most impactful moments came on page 162 in a description of Flask. Melville writes:

“But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap into the mizen-top for a shelf, he goes down rollicking, so far at least as he remain visible from the deck, reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping onto the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of Abjectus…” (162).

Flask, after hearing that dinner is ready, seems to go into a dramatic and hilarious performance that involves all sorts of theatrics. This level of performance touches on the recurring themes of theater and Shakespeare throughout Moby Dick, thus far. Instead of describing Flask getting up, grabbing his hornpipe, playing a song, and pulling himself together before joining Ahab, the narrator deliberately describes his actions step-by-step, giving them a level of performance that belongs on the stage of a grand theater. This level of description paints Flask as a character in a much larger production with the Pequod as the stage. In this scenario, Ismael plays the role of the audience, taking in information and having no significant role in the plot (so far) while describing the peculiarities of the ship and her inhabitants. The level of detail given to Flask and his actions is reminiscent of Ismael’s observance of Queequeg in earlier chapters. As we touched on in class, Ismael spends most of his narrative focus simply staring at other characters, collecting and cataloging small details that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this way, in our course discussions on who he is and how reliable Ismael is as a narrator, maybe we’ve got it wrong. Instead of looking at Ismael as the narrator, we might benefit more from looking at him as the audience in a production much bigger than he is.

Ahab, in all his mysterious glory, is the central protagonist who stirs, quite literally, the central plot. In the chapters where Ismael is not directly retelling the happenings of the ship, such as “The Pipe,” there is a noticeable absence of detailed explanations because Ismael is not physically present on stage. Instead of getting the dramatic, theatrical paintings of a scene from Ismael, we, as the readers and audience of this production, are watching it ourselves.

The Mast Head – How Romantic

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It’d probably be easy to imagine yourself on a ship, and maybe you have been on a ship at some point in your life, but I think Ishmael really makes the idle yet active task on being atop the mast-head a bit romantic. Romanticism encapsulates the idea of emotion over rationality, of being in the moment. There needs to be a sense of calm. Now, there probably won’t be any idea of calm when encountering a whale, or being so high up on the mast-head if you’re afraid of heights, but Ishmael describes the job as such:

“There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade wings blow; everything resolves you into languor.” (169)

Languor. Tiredness. The ship itself is tranced by the sea, hypnotized by the pattern that often causes sea-sickness for sailors present atop of the ship. Even so, Ishmael addresses the reader with many “yous” after this chunk of text I present, and it makes me wonder as to how we’re supposed to think about the idea of how tediousness this seems. He’s directly talking about a job that often causes sailors to be tired, but I think there’s this idea of a good and bad tired. On another note, there’s also something about standing up from a high place and looking down at the world as something to be conquered. Even though the vast majority of the sea is unknowable, there’s this idea of high and mightiness based on the position of the mast-head on the Pequod. Personifying and Romanticizing the ship is also something that helps ground these sailors, something terrestrial despite their job at sea. They have to be attached to the very thing that keeps them afloat.

The Whiteness of the Whale

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I find myself coming back over and over to chapter 42 “The Whiteness of the Whale” trying to decipher what it could mean. The last paragraph is pointing me in the direction of this whiteness being a kind of blank canvas for us to project our own thoughts and meanings upon. Melville asks “or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows– a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” (212). What’s striking to me here is the contrast which Melville seems to love: this absence of, yet concrete of all colors, the “colorless, all-color”. It seems that this whiteness is another of the unanswerable questions, ungraspable phantoms of life that we are left to define for ourselves. This “dumb blankness, full of meaning” is nothing yet everything at the same time.

I’m sure there’s a better or more technical term for this, but I’m imagining this whiteness as a zero, its in this neutral state, without any “subtile deceits” of color, but it has the potential to go anywhere? It’s why white can be seen as pure, innocent, noble, even divine, but at the same time there’s this uneasiness because of its association to ghostly apparitions and overall the emptiness that it suggests. The whiteness of the whale suggests more about us than the whale itself, which we see in Ahab’s decision that this whale is everything that is evil as he projects all of his hatred and anger upon it, while others such as Ishmael continue to question the conflicting feelings that this whiteness puts upon us, perhaps a way of showing the indefinite nature of life itself.

Week 8: The prisoner and the wall

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So we finally meet Captain Ahab, the “ungodly, god-like” captain of the Pequod with an intimidating, fearsome aura. As it turns out, Ahab has a vengeance-filled obsession over the titular whale Moby Dick, a whale who bit off his leg. In chapter 36, there is one part of his speech that stood out to me.

After his shipmates ask Ahab why he is seeking vengeance on one particular whale for taking his leg, Ahab replies, “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.” (Melville 178)

I found this part of his speech interesting because Ahab is trying to tell us that humans tend to fixate on something in the hopes of a reward if they “strike through” it. The more we try to find something valuable in what we desire, the more obsessed we are over it. Too much obsession, however, can end up hurting us.

A prisoner is to a wall as Ahab is to Moby Dick. Much like how a prisoner obsesses over freedom so they break through the wall to find what they’re looking for, Ahab’s desire for revenge is what makes him obsess over Moby Dick. The whale acts like a wall to him because it is still somewhere in the ocean, and he feels taunted by its continued existence. He thinks there is “naught beyond” hunting Moby Dick for a couple of reasons: if the whole reason he is going out to sea is to hunt down one whale that so tormented him, despite there being other whales to hunt, it would not “fetch [him] much in [their] Nantucket market]” as Starbuck points out (Melville 177). Even worse, the whaling voyage might lead to his entire crew dying before they successfully hunt down Moby Dick.

I think this goes to show how unhealthily obsessed Captain Ahab is over Moby Dick, but it also shows us how excessive obsession can blind us from pursuing our real desires. Ahab was once (and still is) a great whaler, but his obsession over Moby Dick has turned him away from the joys of whaling. His lust for revenge has consumed him; no longer is he the same person he once was, his one goal is to hunt down the one monster that took his leg–even if it means dying in the end.

Jesus and the Last Supper (Week 8: 34-42)

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As our main characters, Ishmeal and Queequeg finally board the ship, we eagerly await the reveal of the mystical captain Ahab. Thus far in the novel, Ahab has only been introduced through the perspective of other characters—but has yet to be witnessed in person.

 His character not being seen but only speculated about, creates a mysterious and intriguing aura that suggests the importance of Ahab as a character to the story’s ultimate driving direction. I would even go as far as to say Ahab is a representation of the Prophet that will guide the crew to their destiny on their journey through the ocean. Much like Jesus Christ guiding the direction of the religious experience for his disciples. However, this ultimately leads me to believe that his fate, and that of his crew will end in the same tragic style of the death of Jesus.   

This is hinted at in the subtle allusion to biblical text and the relation to his status and royalty. The power of God is built upon faith, and in many aspects, this is similar to the role of a ship captain—the crew must put their faith in the captain’s ability to lead them. 

IF we consider the Ocean as a sort of religious experience, it opens the possibility for those who are conduits of this experience to guide this journey. In this case the captain becomes a prophet dedicated to the ocean, a status that is indirectly above regality. 

“He who is the rightly regal and intelligent spirits presides over his own private dinner table of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power and dominion of individual influences for the time; that man’s royalty of state transcends Beshazzar’s [King of Bablyon]” (162). 

This sentiment encapsulates the idea of the captain holding a higher rank than even that of royalty. Considering that royalty is a God given state, it positions God above the royals—and in this sentiment, the captain is above them as well. The language used to describe this state is also specifically biblical, showing that the power is that of a spiritual nature as well as the hierarchy of roles. This situates the status of captain as being that of something godly but not all power. As the story progresses, Ahab will be the one to lead them on the hunt—with the power to steer the direction of their destinies. The question now, is whether he’ll lead them towards glory and heaven or hardship and hell.

Borrowed From The Sea: The Fragility of Life

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At the end of Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” Ishmael closes his reflection on watchkeeping with a haunting sentence: “There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship: by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.” (Melville 173) It’s a moment that collapses the sailor’s physical existence into a more spiritual chain of dependence. Melville ties the ship, sea, and God together in a rhythm that both sustains and erases individuality.

This line captures how Moby-Dick constantly blurs the line between the material and the metaphysical. Ishmael is speaking of the literal rocking of the ship, but the repetition of “by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God” transforms that motion into a meditation on creation as well as power. Life is described not as something self-contained and private but more as something borrowed, a gift moving through layers of being: from the divine to the ocean, from the ocean to the ship, and finally into Ishmael himself. The chain of dependence reveals human fragility. Our very existence rests on something vast, shifting, and very unknowable.

At the same time, there’s comfort in the image. The “gently rolling ship” gives an almost peacefulness to Ishmael’s isolation, and the sea becomes a living intermediary between man and God. He is never alone when he’s on the ocean. Yet Melville’s phrasing, such as “inscrutable tides,” reminds us that this connection is mysterious, even dangerous. The same tides that lend life also take it away. I think that Ishmael’s meditation at the masthead mirrors one of the novel’s central paradoxes: the ocean as both cradle and grave, revelation and oblivion.

I believe that this passage suggests that life at sea, and perhaps all human life, exists in a state of borrowed motion. The “rocking life” is not something Ishmael, or any of us, owns; it passes through, over, and around him like the tide. Melville leaves us with a vision of existence that is deeply dependent and deeply uncertain. A quiet acknowledgment in the novel that whatever life gives us, it is never fully ours to keep.

Week 8: Vengeance

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What stuck with me from this week’s reading was a quote from Starbuck in The Quarter Deck. During Ahab’s obsessive rampage about Moby Dick, Starbuck says: “‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!… that simply smote these from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous’” (p. 178). This idea has been mentioned before in the book and in our class, but it is touched upon again. The innocence of nature, and to what extent these beings are innocent. 

I always find this debate to be particularly interesting because it calls into question what level of consciousness animals possess when juxtaposed to us, humans. What level of moral compass do we expect from these beings, and can we judge them the same way we judge humans? This quote by Starbucks says we can’t, that animals like whales are simply acting upon instinct and not from a place of bad intention or harm. While I can’t speak on whales, I would like to bring up the idea of dolphins. Seemingly harmless and playful, anyone who has done some research on them knows their intentions and interactions with others in the ocean are often harmful and malicious, ranging from getting high off other animals and purposeful assault. 

Another way I want to analyze this quote is from the idea of vengeance, regardless of the “dumb thing” being the source of harm. This calls into question the idea of revenge, and whether that is even something one should take, whether the one who harmed did it on purpose or not. Is that not stooping to that low level, especially one of physical harm? Ahab is the captain of this boat, and should one want to be led by one who engages in petty vengeance? Who might hold a grudge on the ship for a small transgression?