Tag Archives: Short Essay

Essay 2: Motherhood, Youth, and Loss

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It was through the tireless efforts of whaling and the pursuit, harvesting, and selling of whale bodies, namely spermaceti, that the newly born United States grew to be an economic and worldly powerhouse. Upon the worn wooden decks of American whaling ships, held sailors who, dedicated to the opportunities that a successful chase ensued, waited with bated breath and watched with eager, sea-splintered eyes for victims. The excitement of the hunt dominates the majority of the focus throughout Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, whether it is through a detailed depiction of the harpooning process or the loud, moment-to-moment account of the happenings of each person; the chase is narrated in rushed, keen tones. However, while the pursuit of a whale ends in profit, in the jars, pots, and head-topped boilers, it also ends in death and loss – the negative consequences that are often left unaddressed and unconsidered. 

When it is considered, the losses that occur in the pursuit of whales and profit, it is hardly done with an emphasis on the whale or the victim. This part of whaling, the cost of life that is required for human profit and capitalistic pursuit, is hardly acknowledged, except for one moment. In chapter 87, titled “The Grand Armada,” the Pequod encounters an extraordinary “armada” of whales and, in the tireless pursuit of the hunt, gets trapped in the very center of the group, emerging in a still, gentle calm. Beyond the depiction of this massive grouping, or school, of whales as a naval battalion organized and ready to fight, Ishmael looks down, interrupting our maritime warescene and taking a breath. It’s in Ishmael’s recognition of “the women and children of [the] routed host” of this whale formation that Melville deliberately pauses, taking the reader’s focus away from the battle drum of the great Leviathans and instead, peering into the watery realities of female and young whales (Melville 423). At this moment, Melville encourages readers to reflect on the cost of whaling and its impact on those affected, touching on and critiquing the broader moral implications of humanity’s capitalistic pursuits through reflections on motherhood, youth, and the consequences of loss. 

It is in the chase of whales and the drumbeat of the pursuit that Melville forces the focus away from the single considerations of the possibilities for monetary gain from killing and harvesting a whale to not only reflect on the water around them, but make eye contact with the very beings that exist in it. Almost as if, in this moment, Melville is encouraging the reader to remember that it is a life that you are pursuing, and to recall its origins and how it came to be. Remember that it too has a mother and children, that it lives a life bigger than being the pursee of opportunistic capitalist gain. This reflective moment is not a stance against whaling or capitalism as a whole, but rather a radical encouragement of empathy and awareness in consumption.

What I Know Will Kill me

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A third of the way through Moby Dick, Herman Melville pauses to admit that human understanding, like the sea, will never be complete. Through his self-reflexive gesture, he reveals how the novel’s structure and language embody the same instability and depth as the sea it describes. When he compares his own writing to the unfinished cathedral of Cologne, the moment feels like a statement of purpose. Melville accepts that both human understanding and whaling exist in constant motion, always in draft form, never fully knowable. By leaving his “copestone to posterity,” (157) he invites readers to see incompleteness not as failure but as truth: that the search for meaning, like the ocean itself, has no end. 

Throughout Moby Dick, the sea represents both the vastness of human curiosity and the futility of fully understanding it, setting the stage for Melville’s later reflections on unfinished knowledge. In fact its the lack of answers and mysteries that initially draw Ishmael—and Melville— to the expedition. There’s a moment in chapter thirty-two when Melville steps out from behind the page to address the reader directly: “Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (157). Ishmael admits that his attempt to classify whales, to make some order out of the ocean’s chaos, isn’t working. He compares his effort to the unfinished cathedral of Cologne, and suddenly the novel feels less like a polished epic and more like a living process. It’s as if Melville is saying, of course it’s unfinished; how could it not be? The metaphor elevates incompleteness into a kind of artistic pursuit: just as great architecture outlives its architects, ideas outgrow their initial parameters. 

Subsequently, this embrace of incompleteness becomes a philosophy. To understand the sea is to accept that total comprehension is impossible. Rather than offering mastery, Melville offers humility and ambition. By calling his work “a draught of a draught,” he knows that what he’s doing is incomplete, but he also knows that incompleteness is the only honest way to write about something as vast as the ocean, or even existence itself. In this manner Melville reveals a deeper awareness of what it means to categorize something as ungraspable as the sea and whaling. Every attempt to name, chart, or dissect ends up reflecting human limitation rather than mastery. By his declaration, truth and understanding has no endpoint, the truth lies in the pursuit. His prayer, “God keep me from ever completing anything,” isn’t a failure of discipline; its a longing. Melville’s moment of self-awareness acknowledges that even his grand novel cannot contain its subject; it can only gesture toward it. In that way, the passage becomes a confession and a creative manifesto all at once: to write about the sea is to chase something that cannot be caught, and the beauty lies in the chase itself. 

The admission of failure on Melville’s part is the genesis of his ‘openness’ philosophy. His embrace of the unfinished suggests that meaning is not something waiting at the end of a journey but something that emerges through the act of searching. His expedition, whaling in the sea, becomes a metaphor for that process; it mirrors the constant evolution of thought, interpretation and identity. Ishmael does not seek to master the ocean but to sail it. Accepting that uncertainty it the most honest form of understanding. In celebrating the unfinished, Melville changes the reader’s desire for closure and clarity. Instead he invites us to value incompleteness as a space of possibility. A subtle reminder that knowledge, like the sea, is always in motion. Every attempt to pin down meaning gives way to another wave of interpretation. 

Melville’s “draught of a draught” captures more than a writer’s frustration; it captures the credo of Moby Dick itself. By refusing to finish his “system,” Melville refuses the illusion that any work of art or thought can ever be complete. This refusal may seem radical, especially in a world, like our own, that values certainty and resolution. Through incompleteness, Melville preserves evolution, his book remains capable of change. The reader, like Ishmael, is left drifting but not lost. We come to see that being “at sea” is not a condition to escape but one to embrace. Melville’s ocean, and his novel, is reminding us that life’s deepest meanings are like grand buildings, a “copestone to posterity.”

Short Essay – Ishmael, Queequeg, and a Nation of Fear and Ignorance

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In the book Moby Dick, author Herman Melville uses the development of human relations to critique American society as a whole, building off the inability to determine differences between races and ethnicities to create a nation that is incomplete in its understanding of one another. Throughout Moby Dick, the reader can see the tension or heartfelt companionship between different characters, most of their relations quite intriguing when compared to the time. Most notable is the relationship between the narrator, Ishmael – a white, middle-class, Presbyterian Christian – and Queequeg, a black, Pagan cannibal. Melville uses the evolution of Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship to illustrate how curiosity and lack of fear of the unknown serve as a fundamental factor in personal growth and the bettering of the United States as a nation built on ignorance, showing how a willingness to understand what is unfamiliar to a person can transform ignorance and prejudice into mutual understanding and respect. 

Chapter four of the book is the most notable for the strange and rather rushed companionship between Ishmael and Queequeg, though it is not the focus of this essay.  The narrator’s lack of information regarding his new roommate at the Spouter Inn dissolves into a state of pure panic; who could this man be? A murderer? A savage? Of what race or occupation could he have been? With little information on who Queequeg actually was – even the lack of his name earlier in the book – Ishmael resorts to outbursts of fear and anger, demanding to know who he is to be roomed with. Upon reveal, his own prejudice in regards to black individuals and cannibals from never-before-seen islands of the South Pacific Ocean, Ishmael cannot help but be both terrorized and enraged. Though very subtle, concerning the time in which Moby Dick was written, the United States was divided based on race and slavery. The North and the South were at odds with what to do about runaway slaves, and whether the new states occupied through Westward Expansion were to be turned into free or slave states. Newbedford, Massachusetts, where Ishmael and Queequeg first met, was a free state, but with the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act circulating at that time, tensions between white and black individuals were at an all-time high. With historical context, we can see where Ishmael’s fear stems from – from the unknown identity of his roommate, and later, the realization that Queequeg was an uncivilized, black cannibal. 

From this lack of understanding of who and what Queequeg actually was stemmed a guttural sense of curiosity within Ishmael. The simple nature of observing Queequeg and his actions – the way he walks, dresses, his tattoos, his Pagan idolatry towards Yojo (the small doll he carries with him and seemingly worships), and his speech – began to break down the barriers of ignorance that separated Ishmael and Queequeg into various categories. Queequeg states in Chapter thirteen, “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians” (pp. 68). The much-needed development of the United States, to Melville, should be built on a mutual understanding of one another, not the categorization and segregation of white from the “other”. To Queequeg, we all all human, and despite the initial introduction between him and Ishmael, the curiosity shown between the two of them has developed into a mutual understanding and respect for each other. Melville uses this development in their relationship to critique to ignorance of the United States, founded on the lack of understanding of what makes white superior to other races, and condemning our nation to a future of further ignorance as it grows into the idea of fear of the unknown. We fear what we lack knowledge of, whether it be the depths of the ocean or the idea that we are all the same, regardless of our race. 

What makes the quote above so intriguing within the book is that prior, Queequeg is overwhelmed with a “profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people happier” (62), only to learn that the glorious nation of the United States and its Christian citizens were in fact so backwards in their ways of thinking and understanding one another that they should instead learn from the cannibals. Ironic to think about: Christians learning from the ways of cannibals, a group demonized and referred to as uncivilized and dangerous, not only for their race, but for their culture. The lack of knowledge of Queequeg and his people instilled a fear towards them, one that makes Ishmael and his relationship so out of the ordinary to most. Their relationship is a direct reflection of what Melville hopes the United States to become: an accepting, knowledgeable nation built on the mutual respect and understanding of different peoples, not one that is separated based on race, and the idea that white is superior to all else. 

The latter idea alone can be torn from its pedestal under the singular quote that Queequeg believes white Christians should learn from the group they despise to return to a place of unity over division. Moby Dick, while encompassing numerous allegories and references to the foundation of our society and nation, focuses on how the lack of knowledge and understanding of oneself and others can form a rift from which we develop as a nation into an ignorant and fearful people.