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.