Tag Archives: Moby-Dick

Chapter 1 – The relationship with the sea.

Posted on by
4

As I began to read the first chapter of Moby-Dick, a quote stuck out to me. It reads, “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?” (Melville 5). After this quote Melville dives deeper into human’s history with the sea, dating back thousands of years with the ancient Persians and Greeks. This got me thinking about how throughout our history there has been a fascination and a desire of the ocean. A means of transportation, a means of trade, a means of sailing to a new land to start a new life, all of these things have lasted in our history for an incredible amount of time. Why is it we as humans are so interested in the sea? Is it because we want to conquer the unconquerable? Or is it because we have learned to respect the vast power of it, and try to use it to our advantage. As we’ve learned through our blue humanities studies, humans are definitely more land oriented, despite the Earth being covered majority in water. Is our fascination with the ocean something we are born with, or is it something that becomes stronger the more knowledge we try to have of it?

Our narrator, Ishmael, has his own personal history and fascination with the sea. We learn that he frequents ships, in his own words, “as a simple sailor”, not a passenger, a commodore, a captain, or a cook. Ishmael sails because he likes the ocean; he risks that comes with going out in the water and being in a place where nothing matter outside of one’s own survival. No one is more important than any other in the sea, and all lives are treated equally. He also claims that he goes out to the sea as a sailor so that he can get paid, something that I feel demonstrates the industrialization of the ocean. When people see that they can use something as a means to make money, there’s no doubt they will exploit the most they can for the profit. While Ishmael may not be drilling oil in the sea, or causing a vast amount of damage to marine life, he is still going on a whaling ship, and is still harming an animal in their own environment.

It was interesting for me to read about humanity’s relationship with the sea through the eyes of Ishmael (which is probably more so through the eyes of Melville). It definitely made me think about my own personal history with it, and think about how much the history has progressed throughout the years. I am interested to see how Ishmael and the other sailors further deepen their own relationships with the ocean as the novel progresses.

Moby-Dick Extracts

Posted on by
Reply

It is interesting to see the different extracts presented at the beginning of the novel and to see that various ways that humans try to understand the sperm whale. One quote that stood out to me states: “Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded jaw snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.” (Currents and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex., 49) Every description of the whale in these extracts depicts it as a violent monster, even though the whales themselves are not inherently dangerous creatures – it is humans that bring out the worst in them. These extracts show us insight on what men were struggling with: the very idea of the whale. 

In reality, these creatures are usually calm and placid, spending most of their time in the deep ocean, rarely interacting with humans. It is also important to consider early 19th-century whaling practices, which were both an economic necessity and a dangerous pursuit to men. They depended on these creatures to provide for them but also feared them, which can be contradicting. Humans go out of their way to hunt for these creatures then act shocked when they retaliate, painting them as a vicious monster when, in truth, it is humans who embodied monstrosity. This can be seen as a form of projection: men frame the whale as the aggressor rather than acknowledge int their roles as intruders, which reveals more about human arrogance than it does about fear of the whale itself. 

This contrast between the whale’s natural behavior and the monstrous image that humans impose on the creature can possibly show a reflection onto what “Moby-Dick” has to offer. It will be interesting to see how humanity’s fear of the unknown and our tendencies to project violence onto the natural world plays a role throughout the novel. 

Unmoored, Vulnerable, Dispensable – Past & Present Converging as One

Posted on by
1

                Reading the introduction to Moby-Dick made me considerably nervous – not dissimilar to the nervousness I experience watching movie trailers in the modern era. I do not long for synopsis, I do not strive to have my stories spoon fed to me in digestible segments shorn from the story like butchered meat before I ever get the opportunity to read it for myself. I want to dive into the ocean of language, into the thick of the chaos and make my peace with my ability to sink or swim along with the author’s current. The farther into the introduction I read, the more I found things that my brain will elect to latch on to thanks to Andrew DelBanco’s focus on them – such as the figure Bulkington that is due to appear in chapter three and then “recedes from view until twenty chapters later” (xvi). I do not wish to read about how “everything becomes unmoored, vulnerable, dispensable” (xviii). I wish to find myself adrift!

                When not exposing the story beats, speaking of important later moments well before the time we access them ourselves, there is much to dissect and carry with us as we venture into Moby-Dick. DelBanco’s belief that “Melville…extracted a human sample from a culture he both loved and abhorred, and he made of the Pequod a kind of Noah’s ark” is absolutely fascinating (xxi). Yet more amazing still is the knowledge that these human capsules are still reflective of figures in power today. It’s impossible to discern which is a more terrifying revelation: That time is inevitably cyclical, forever repeating the mistakes of the past with brighter clarity, or that the individuals in power frequently exhibit the same monomania of the doomed captain of the Pequod. Our ship continues to steer into darker, dangerous waters, my friends.