In Chapter 112, “The Blacksmith”, Melville’s language in this chapter fuses death, transcendence, and the sea into one symbolic symbol. He states, “Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them…” (Melville 529) This passage encapsulates one of Moby-Dicks central paradoxes, that the ocean is a spiritual frontier and also a death drive. To go to the sea is to flirt with the unknown, the sea is an entity that lies beyond the limits of human life. Melville uses this chapter as an allegory to capitalism. The sailor’s attraction to the sea mirrors humans’ attraction to metaphysical danger, the wish to lose oneself in something vast, to escape the confinements of individuality. 

Melville starts the beginning of this sentence with bluntness, using the tone of fatalism to reflect the alienation and hardships of a sailor’s life. A “carrier like this” seems to exhaust every human possibility, leaving death as the only remaining sequel, a continuation rather than an end. The middle of the sentence is particularly interesting since it describes the psychological tension between despair and desire; these “death-longing” men are drawn toward annihilating but restrained by “interior compunctions against suicide.” The sea becomes a space that offers the feeling of self-dissolution without the moral finality of suicide. Melville gives a way for sailors to escape from the world without committing the act. The sea absorbs and erases distinctions between man and nature or even purpose and aimlessness. The self loses solidity at sea, it becomes as fluid and unbounded as the waves themselves. The sea grants sailors a simulated death, a temporary relief that satisfies a spiritual craving for release while sparing the soul from the definite consequences of suicide.