Tag Archives: Melville

Final Project Proposal

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Final Project Proposal: I really want to elaborate on my second essay about illumination and how Melville uses whale oil and whalers to reflect on the actual cost of what humans are doing. The contradictions between whalers bringing the light to society while living and acting in the darkness. The whalemen are shown to be both creators and destroyers, and Melville shows quite clearly (ironically enough) that the line between these two is often quite blurry and hard to distinguish.

My thesis is going to argue that a whaleman’s very “life of light” is both his glory and his doom, always tied closely together. I will show this not only through the actual content of the novel but also through the physical grammar and syntax that Melville chooses to use through its structure and rhythm. “What begins as just a factual observation about whale oil, which happens to be the literal “food of light,” expands into a moral and metaphysical reflection on the cost of illumination itself. Melville’s language transforms physical light into a spiritual metaphor, complicating the whaleman’s apparent purity by revealing the violence and destruction that make such light possible in the first place.” 

Through this creative project I will be demonstrating this argument in an expanded essay of at least 6-8 pages with multiple sources such as Steve Mentz’ articles on the study of blue humanities. I chose this format because it gives me enough space to trace Melville’s symbolic patterns and connect them to broader environmental and ethical questions.

Week 15: Conscious and Unconscious Writing

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What struck me from this week’s reading was from The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame. Riegel mentions on page 200 that the recent revival of Moby Dick has been in the context of modern psychology and philosophy. He goes on to discuss debates over whether Melville is a conscious or unconscious writer, which I think is an interesting topic. This is something I’ve considered a lot; how much of creative work is conscious effort toward an idea/motif/lesson etc, versus how much is a projection of the subconscious. These ideas of the conscious and subconscious are popular in psychology (partially why this part interests me so, since psychology is my major), and are often discussed in many other classes in regards to biology, philosophy etc. However, none of these ideas were strongly present when Melville wrote this book, and I always wonder how much of books are purposefully written in a historical context. It seems Melville did write with intention in some chapters (like Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish), yet others are just abstract ideas of the ocean. Yet, from these chapters too, we can glean insight into Melville, or the political state of the U.S. at the time. This also makes me wonder how Melville wanted this book to be read. Did he write this as a political commentary? Did he write it as a love letter? This type of context would influence the conscious versus unconscious debate; if written as political commentary then perhaps all about Hawthorne is irrelevant. But if written as a love letter (since it is dedicated to Hawthorne), then what is the context of all the political commentary? Even then, is all of this analysis necessary? I think most writers don’t write to have their own lives analyzed, it is the book they want read, not themselves. Yet who a person is makes a book all the more interesting. So should we read this novel as a conscious, intentional novel? Or as a subconscious, projective novel? Does it matter, if we are just projecting our own selves onto the writing?

The Gilder: Let Faith Oust Fact; Let Fancy Oust Memory

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Starbuck had been an adversary for Ahab throughout the novel, but as the voyage progressed, Starbuck could only rely on hopeful illusions to face the noxious reality. In Chapter 114, The Gilder, Melville’s use of forceful diction and stark contrasts reveals how humans cling to imagination to cope with horrifying truths.

Melville uses forceful diction to show Starbuck’s coping mechanisms. On page 535, Melville wrote in Starbuck’s perspective, “‘Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways.’” “Loveliness unfathomable” tells of Starbuck wanting to believe in a positive outcome, and “Tell me not of–” tells of the truths Starbuck wants to reject; the facts that have been happening. He wants to forget and go home, a common coping mechanism for people with trauma.

Melville uses stark contrasts to show Starbuck’s mental state. He wrote Starbuck to explicitly say this because Starbuck was holding on to what little hope he had left. On page 535, Starbuck continued, “‘Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.’” The contrasts, especially the last line, paints Starbuck’s psychological struggle and reliance on imagination. The word “oust” here means to remove, meaning Starbuck wants to replace fact with faith, and memory with “fancy”. Perhaps here, fancy means imagination, and in this case, Starbuck is saying he’d rather believe in faith and imagination than accept fact and memory. This ties into the religious context, where believing that a mental construct exists feels more satisfying than facing reality. 

Melville’s use of diction and contrasts highlights Starbuck’s mentality. The diction had shown Starbuck’s conviction with his iron-willed beliefs. The contrasts between faith/fancy and fact/memory show not only the internal conflict in Starbuck’s morals, but also how he wants to be a good man in a world of cruelty. Applicably, people in real life struggle more in living with fact and memory than believing themselves in faith and imagination.

Essay #2: Ishmael, lost at sea

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In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville repeatedly stages moments in which the sea overwhelms the boundaries of human identity, but few scenes capture this more powerfully than Ishmael’s trance on the masthead. Suspended high above the Pequod, Ishmael drifts into a state of “opium-like listlessness” in which consciousness loosens, perception widens, and the difference between the self and the ocean begins to dissolve. This moment is not merely atmospheric; it dramatizes a philosophical crisis at the center of the novel. Through his hypnotic depiction of reverie, loss of identity, and spiritual diffusion, Melville suggests that human life is shaped by natural forces far greater than individual will. In the masthead passage, Melville uses imagery of trance, cosmic absorption, and tidal ebbing to show that identity is unstable and never fully self-owned; this dissolution reveals a deeper, universal soul that undercuts the American ideal of a singular, autonomous self and that, ultimately, the overwhelming power of nature exposes the fragility of the man-made structures and hierarchies that the novel otherwise appears to uphold. In tracing how the sea absorbs Ishmael’s individuality, the passage becomes a quiet critique of national identity, human authority, and the illusion of personal sovereignty.

The passage below, which occurs during Ishmael’s solitary watch on the masthead in Chapter 35, captures the trance-like dissolution of self:

“But lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is the absent-minded youth of blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature… In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space.” (172–173)

This moment, with its shifting sensory language and its movement from reverie to cosmic dissolution, initiates Melville’s larger unraveling of individual identity–an unraveling that begins with the very nature of Ishmael’s altered consciousness.

Melville opens the masthead scene by depicting Ishmael’s consciousness as drugged by the natural world, using the language of trance to unravel the boundaries of individual agency. The phrase “opium-like listlessness” immediately establishes a state in which Ishmael’s mind is no longer directed by will, intention, or purpose. This simile is striking because it attributes to the sea the agency typically associated with a narcotic: the ocean becomes a substance that infiltrates and alters consciousness simply by being contemplated. “Listlessness” emphasizes not just relaxation but a near-total suspension of motivation—a dangerous condition given Ishmael’s precarious position on the masthead. Melville intensifies this sensation through the paradoxical phrase “vacant, unconscious reverie.” Reverie ordinarily implies imaginative or even productive mental wandering, but here it becomes emptied out: the mind is active and inactive at once, drifting but directionless. This tension between motion and vacancy mirrors the larger tension in the novel between the desire for self-determination and the pull of environmental forces that erode that autonomy. Ishmael’s trance, then, is not simply daydreaming at sea; it is the erosion of his ability to think or move independently. Yet this initial loss of control is only the beginning, for Melville soon expands Ishmael’s trance into a profound dissolution of self that reaches far beyond mere distraction.

As the passage deepens, Melville makes the collapse of Ishmael’s individuality explicit, casting the ocean as a “mystic” embodiment of a universal soul that destabilizes the idea of a singular, autonomous identity. The bluntness of the phrase “he loses his identity” stands out amid the otherwise lyrical description. Melville refuses metaphor here: the loss is direct, unmistakable. Yet the surrounding language transforms this loss into something more cosmic than terrifying. Ishmael “takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.” This sentence fuses perception with metaphysics; the sea becomes both an external force and a symbolic embodiment of a collective human essence. The adjectives “deep,” “blue,” and “bottomless” work together to evoke not just physical depth but spiritual depth—the unknowable fullness of a universal soul in which boundaries cannot be located, let alone defended. Most crucial is the phrase “pervading mankind and nature,” which dissolves any distinction between human identity and the natural world. Ishmael becomes part of a continuum rather than an isolated self. In this way, the passage quietly challenges the American ideal of a self-made, self-contained individual. Melville replaces singularity with pervasiveness, autonomy with absorption. If this identity-loss challenges the notion of a self-contained individual, the passage’s final imagery pushes even further, suggesting that the self not only dissolves but cycles back into the vast motions of the natural world.

Melville’s imagery of ebbing and diffusion portrays human life as a temporary, borrowed motion, a force that passes through the individual rather than originating within it. When the narrator claims that in this enchanted mood “thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came,” he invokes tidal language that links Ishmael’s soul directly to the rhythms of the ocean. An ebb is not disappearance but return: it signals a cycle, a movement back toward an original source. The implication is that human life is not inherently self-directed but participates in natural and possibly cosmic currents far older and more powerful than the individual. Melville follows this with the even more expansive statement that the spirit “becomes diffused through time and space.” Diffusion suggests scattering, dispersal, the loss of borders. The verb erases containment; diffusion is the negation of identity’s edges. Ishmael does not merely blend into the sea—he dissolves into the universe. This condition radically opposes the American emphasis on personal sovereignty, suggesting instead that identity is something briefly concentrated within a human body and then released again. This vision of life as cyclical and uncontained gains further significance when we consider where the passage appears in the novel, a placement that directly interacts with the Pequod’s rigid social and symbolic structures.

Placed early in the voyage, the masthead scene subtly undermines the Pequod’s rigid social order by revealing that nature’s vast, absorbing power renders human hierarchies—and the American individualism that sustains them—fragile and illusory. At this point in the narrative, Ishmael has only recently joined the crew and is still orienting himself within the ship’s structure of authority, labor, and racial hierarchy. Below him operate the systems that define the Pequod as a microcosm of American society: Ahab’s emerging command, the capitalist imperative of the whaling mission, and the ethnic stratification visible among the sailors. Above him, however, these structures collapse. The masthead offers an elevated vantage point not only physically but philosophically. It removes Ishmael from the ship’s human order and places him in direct relation to the sea, which reveals itself as a force indifferent to the divisions and identities constructed below. The trance thus becomes a momentary emancipation from the artificial boundaries of nationality, race, and profession. It also foreshadows the conflict between Ishmael’s fluid, receptive identity and Ahab’s rigid, monomaniacal one. While Ishmael’s self dissolves into the sea, Ahab’s hardens against it; the placement of this passage anticipates the inevitable consequences of resisting the ocean’s overwhelming power. Seen in this broader narrative context, the masthead moment becomes more than a lyrical digression; it serves as a thematic blueprint for the novel’s unfolding confrontation between human selfhood and the overwhelming force of the sea.

In the masthead passage, Melville reveals how the sea dismantles the illusion of personal autonomy through its imagery of trance, identity-loss, and diffusion. Ishmael’s consciousness loosens, his individuality dissolves, and his spirit cycles outward into a force that precedes and exceeds him. By placing this moment early in the narrative, Melville underscores the fragility of human systems—national, hierarchical, or otherwise—when measured against nature’s absorbing vastness. The passage ultimately suggests that identity is not a possession to be defended but a temporary form taken on by forces far larger than the self. In a novel that frequently focuses on the limits of human power, the masthead scene stands as an early reminder that the self, however cherished, is always perched on the edge of dissolution.

Ebb and Flow

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In Chapter 111 on page 525, Melville wrote “The waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly…” It was part of a sentence, but what caught my eye is the word “should.” Why “should”? Why not “will” or “can”? But as I read further, I realized that this explains the inevitability of life itself. It is the only part of the full sentence that sounds rhythmic, like how waves themselves move. The word “unceasingly” simply means “eternal.” In other words, the waves move eternally. Adding the implication, Melville presenting the sea as a symbol of constant motion also becomes how life is in constant motion.

“The waves should rise and fall” suggests the ups and downs of life. It’s basically not normal for an entire lifespan to be completely calm and serene. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be happy. We have emotions so we can experience life like a rollercoaster, or rather a storm in a voyage. Mistakes are made to teach. Failures and setbacks show flaws. You can strive for the calm and serene, but the journey to get there will never be.

“Ebb and flow” suggests a cycle of experiences. Many things can restart, many things can be relived. The most vivid example is the damning fact Moby Dick teaches you how to read after already knowing how to read. The phrase “ebb and flow” shows how life teaches: even with everything you have learned, there’s still thousands more to know.

Why Melville consciously chose “should” and nothing else is because life “should” rise and fall, ebb and flow, as you grow as a person.

Loveliness Unfathomable

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In Chapter 114, “The Gilder,” we see a rare moment of faith that momentarily interrupts the darkness that pervades Moby-Dick. Looking out at the calm, sunlit sea, Starbuck softly declares, “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye! — Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” The tone here is startlingly romantic, one could even argue, devotional, as Starbuck compares the ocean’s beauty to that of a lover’s gaze. His use of “unfathomable” carries a double meaning, as it refers both to the literal depth of the sea and to its spiritual or emotional mystery, something that cannot be fully understood or measured. By personifying the ocean and addressing it directly, Starbuck acknowledges that it’s a living presence, treating it almost as a divine being. Yet, his language is also defensive or nervous. The command “Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks” reveals a conscious effort to suppress the darker aspects of the sea, as though faith itself requires him to silence what he may or may not know to be true.

When Starbuck says, “Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory,” Melville captures the tension between spiritual idealism and lived experience. Each pair of opposites listed represents conflicting ways of perceiving the world. Fact and memory are the tangible realities of whaling that we can see: blood, death, and brutality. Faith and fancy, on the other hand, belong more to the imagination, an almost inner realm where hope can still survive. The repeated verb “oust” suggests a kind of internal struggle, maybe even violence, as if belief must forcibly remove reality to be able to endure. Starbucks’ plea, then, is not naïve but desperate. He knows exactly what the sea (and humankind) is capable of, yet he chooses to believe in its beauty. This active substitution of replacing knowledge with belief reveals the cost of maintaining faith in an environment shaped by danger and moral corruption.

Melville seems to situate this moment within a broader pattern throughout the novel, where the crew alternates between seeing the sea as a site of terror and transcendence. For Ahab, the ocean mirrors divine indifference and becomes an enemy to be conquered. For Ishmael, it represents a vast, unfixed mystery that draws him toward humility. Starbuck, however, tries to reconcile these opposing views by turning to faith. His insistence that “faith oust fact” is not simply religious but existential because it becomes a survival mechanism for someone trapped between moral conscience and obedience to Ahab’s doomed mission.

The final line, “I look deep down and do believe,” solidifies this tension between perception and truth. The phrase “deep down” implies both introspection as well as descent into the ocean, the self, and the unseen. Melville’s syntax seems very purposeful here. It slows the reader, as if mimicking the steady, deliberate act of belief itself. The simple, emphatic “do believe” reads like a vow. A deliberate act of will against possible despair. Yet there is ambiguity in what he believes. Does Starbuck truly find divinity in the sea, or is his faith a fragile illusion meant to stave off any madness? The line holds both possibilities. To “look deep down” may mean confronting the abyss, acknowledging that faith and destruction coexist in the same depth.

This passage captures Melville’s meditation on the human need to find meaning within a hostile world. Starbuck’s moment of reverence does not erase the ocean’s “kidnapping cannibal ways,” but it does reveal a deeper truth: that belief itself is an act of courage. To see “loveliness unfathomable” in something that is so deeply unknown is to assert that beauty and faith can persist, however tenuously, even amid the knowledge of violence. Melville gives Starbuck this brief vision of transcendence not as comfort, but as contrast. It is a fleeting reminder of how fragile the light of faith can be when set against the vast, indifferent sea, but sometimes it’s exactly what we need.

White, the color of absence and death, in flame

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Throughout Moby-Dick, there has been a kind of attention to the number 3. There are 3 mates for the ships, 3 mast heads to the ship, and the 3 peaks featured on the doubloon, but there are also supernatural connections to 3 sprinkled through out the novel, such as the blood of 3 harpooners to temper Ahab’s barb, the 3 fires alight the top of the mast heads, as well as 3 people prophesizing Ahab’s demise: the prophet, Gabriel from the Jeroboam, and the Parsee.

This is a number present in the Bible – the holy trinity – and even Pythagoras, a great philosopher of Greek History that has been mentioned at least once in the novel, believed that the number three was special. One such reason was that it is the only number where the numbers that come before it add perfectly to it. Another reason, and one that I link more to this section of the novel than his other reasons, was that it seems to reflect our world on a conceptual level – beginning, middle, end; birth, life, death.

In the chapter, The Candles, this number is repeated and emphasized as the spectral lights cast brilliant shadows onto the ship below.

“All the yard arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightening-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” (549)

This all comes two chapters out from Parsee’s prediction of Ahab’s death by hemp rope, after Ahab calls it a strange sight the idea of a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean. For reference, hearse plumes were ostrich feathers that would adorn hearse carriages at the time, signaling the departed’s wealth and status. Having 5-6 plumes meant you were wealthy, more meant that you were truly rich. In reference to this, the flames are described as pallid and tapering. What are the flames but Ahab’s own funeral plumes, floating atop the ocean he so desperately searches for his monomaniacal need for revenge?

Ch. 94 – A Squeeze of the Hand

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While a lot of the chapters from this reading went right over my head, I could not help but be drawn to the ending of Chapter 94. Ishmael is discussing the works of the blubber-room and the man who works beneath the deck. From this chapter reads the passage, “With this gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is as sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistant’s, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men” (458). While it is quite gruesome to think about the loss of someone’s toes to a sharp object, toes are used to stabilize us on our feet. I would like to argue that, while the blubber-room and its men are apart of the Pequod, and the Pequod being referenced as its own nation state, that the act of sawing and cutting at blubberous commerce and even at the risk of one’s self, that the blubber-room and its men represents the self destruction of the people within the nation state. As America is at one of its worst points in history, clawing after the idea of white superiority at the expense of others, they are actively cutting through themselves and destabilizing the very foundation that they believe they have erected for themselves and the nation. With the tossing and turning of the nation, creating such an already unstable foundation, the mere acting of cutting down another object in turn leads them to cutting themselves down.

An old & glorious occupation, no more

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Chapter 82, “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” offers us a great insight into the history and mythology of whaling and stories of whales. One section that particularly stood out to me was when Ishmael said, “Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head-waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves” (Melville 397). It truly shows the significance that whaling has had throughout history, it is stories both ancient Greek and Roman, it’s in the Bible, it’s in many different religions such as Hinduism, the impact and importance of whaling is something that has been lost in time as the book has gotten older. Now we look at whaling and we disagree with it, for a good reason of course, but back then it was heroic and it was something that the legendary men in myth, Hercules and Perseus, did.

I think that Melville wrote this chapter to show why whaling should have been considered a prestige occupation with a sort of righteousness that came with it; “when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity” (Melville 395). It seems like Melville is talking about himself here, and how he feels to be included in a group that is surrounded by legends and myths and religious figures, people’s whose stories have been around for millenniums. Another quote that stood out to me was, “Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders” (Melville 395). It shows how much whaling has change from the days of Perseus to when Melville was writing Moby-Dick, and now today were the whaling industry in America is dead.

This chapter definitely showed the historical and mythical significance of whaling. It’s incredible to think that something we now view as unethical and immoral was once viewed as heroic and glorious, however the purpose of whaling has changed significantly since those times. Mythical legends, Saints, Heroes, and gods all take up a seat in whaling, as Melville puts it; “Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?” (Melville 398).

The Anatomy of Understanding

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In Chapter 77, “The Great Heidelburgh Tun,” as Ishmael meticulously describes the anatomy of the sperm whale, he pauses for a moment to reflect and observe, “But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon.” (Melville 371) On the surface, this line refers to the practical work of cutting into a whale’s body, but it also captures something larger about Moby-Dick itself. Melville constantly reminds his readers that understanding, whether of the whale, the ship, or just life at sea, requires looking beneath the surface, especially for us “landsmen.” Ishmael’s words turn the act of whaling into an act of reading: the body of the whale becomes a text, and true comprehension demands attention to all of its inner workings.

This idea aligns with the recurring chapters that anatomize the whale and ship in almost scientific detail, such as “The Sphynx,” “The Blanket,” “The Line,” and “The Monkey-rope.” In each, Ishmael insists on showing the interior, from the bones and the blubber to the lines and ropes, because for him, meaning resides in the hidden systems that actually sustain life and labor. Just as a ship can’t be understood by its sails alone, the whale’s mystery cannot be captured by its surface or exterior. Melville’s fascination with “internal structure” becomes a metaphor for how the novel itself operates: each detailed dissection of the whale’s body or the ship’s machinery draws us closer to the unknowable essence of existence and knowledge, even as it reminds us how incomplete that comprehension will always be.

By linking comprehension to dissection, Melville transforms the very physical and almost brutal act of cutting into an intellectual one. To “know something of the curious internal structure” is to recognize the layered complexity of every object and idea that is presented to the reader in the novel. The whale, the Pequod, and even Ishmael’s narrative share the same architecture. They are massive, mysterious, and full of unseen parts that demand exploration and much deeper thought. Through this, Moby-Dick becomes a kind of living anatomy, a work that invites readers to participate in its own operation, continually digging deeper for a truth that resists full capture.