Tag Archives: whiteness

Week 13 – Chapter 134

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Throughout the entire novel, Ahab has been portrayed as a lord, a God, or an almighty being high above the Pequod and its crew. In Chapter 134, the second day of the chase, Moby Dick has single-handedly torn down all notions of Ahab’s power (despite Ahab surviving). Moby Dick uses the harpoon lines against the crew, capsizing multiple boats and even killing the Parsee, Ahab’s dopple-ganger. He has singled out Ahab numerous times and snapped his ivory leg, leaving him mad, unstable, and reliant on the level-headed members of the crew. Ahab’s own madness and vengeful approach to Moby Dick stirred a rage inside the whale that will ultimately lead to his own downfall.

Above all of this, Ahab’s harpoon, bathed in Pagan blood and cursed in Latin, was told to be the one harpoon that could kill Moby Dick, had to be abandoned. Starbuck has talked of omens numerous times over the pages of the last few chapters, but in Chapter 134, we can see all the bad omens arising against Ahab alone; he will not succeed in his pursuit of killing Moby Dick – the whale is stronger and more adapt to maneuver the ocean and its elements in his favor while tearing down all the stability Ahab has relied on during his voyage. Everything Ahab has is crumbling around him in his pursuit of the white whale. From all of this, we can see that Ahab’s feverish pursuit of whiteness will be his worst decision, tearing down the one thing that has kept him elevated above the rest of the crew for decades; his journey to find whiteness has completely dismantled his power and ultimately left him with nothing, bitter and angry.

Pierce the Whale

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Considering the Loose-Fish doctrine and the whiteness of the whale acting as a blank canvas for Ahab to project upon “all that most maddens and torments… all evil” (200), you can see how vain and piteous Ahab’s final curses upon Moby Dick are: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” (623). Having finally arrived at the expected point, watching his ship perish without him, knowing his death is imminent, he, for the last time, resigns himself to the obsession that set him on this voyage because it is all he knows. Even though we, along with Starbuck and other characters, don’t view the whale as malicious but rather as a dumb brute, Ahab is firm in his declaration that Moby Dick is “all-destroying but unconquering.” This refusal to be “conquered” in his final moments is Ahab’s last attempt at claiming Moby Dick as his Loose-Fish. If Ahab convinces himself that he is righteous in this endless hunt, which he has done throughout the entirety of the novel, he is justified in his own mind to continue walking down the doomed path, no matter the deaths he is responsible for. By piercing Moby Dick with his final curses from hell’s heart for hate’s sake, Ahab willingly condemns himself as a martyr; but Ahab is no martyr in the way he desired. Rather, he is a warning to America of this unrelenting chase towards one thing built upon a vain justification. Ironically, Ahab has become the Fast-Fish, fastened to the whale, tied to “all evil” (his own words), even after death.

The Whiteness of the Whale

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I find myself coming back over and over to chapter 42 “The Whiteness of the Whale” trying to decipher what it could mean. The last paragraph is pointing me in the direction of this whiteness being a kind of blank canvas for us to project our own thoughts and meanings upon. Melville asks “or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows– a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” (212). What’s striking to me here is the contrast which Melville seems to love: this absence of, yet concrete of all colors, the “colorless, all-color”. It seems that this whiteness is another of the unanswerable questions, ungraspable phantoms of life that we are left to define for ourselves. This “dumb blankness, full of meaning” is nothing yet everything at the same time.

I’m sure there’s a better or more technical term for this, but I’m imagining this whiteness as a zero, its in this neutral state, without any “subtile deceits” of color, but it has the potential to go anywhere? It’s why white can be seen as pure, innocent, noble, even divine, but at the same time there’s this uneasiness because of its association to ghostly apparitions and overall the emptiness that it suggests. The whiteness of the whale suggests more about us than the whale itself, which we see in Ahab’s decision that this whale is everything that is evil as he projects all of his hatred and anger upon it, while others such as Ishmael continue to question the conflicting feelings that this whiteness puts upon us, perhaps a way of showing the indefinite nature of life itself.