“Call me Ishmael.” The most famous opening line of any American Novel. And the novel that it opens, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, is one that has often been touted by its admirers as the “Great American Novel.” Moby-Dick makes its appearance on the Guardian list of the greatest novels in English, the Observer’s list of the 100 Greatest World novels, Penguin Classics’ list of 100 Favorite Novels as selected by their readers, and the Norwegian Book Clubs’ 2002 list of the 100 Greatest World Novels, listed in conjunction with the Nobel Institute. It came in at number 46 on the 2018 PBS list of “America’s 100 Favorite Novels,” and is listed here as book number 61 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
In the interests of “equal time,” and full transparency, I should add that Moby-Dick also does awfully well on the occasional lists one runs across of the “Most Boring Classics” in world literature. On Goodreads’ exhaustive list of the 814 “Most Boring Books Ever,” Moby-Dick proudly appears as number 6. The reasons for this are not far to seek. I can think of no other novel in the annals of literature that contains so much non-narrative material so tangentially related to the forward progression of the story. Surely more than half of Moby-Dick consists of scientific or pseudoscientific speculation about the nature and categories of whales, the nature and minute details of human whale-hunting, the history of the species reaching back to earlier ages of the earth, speculation about the future of whales, even several chapters comparing the head of a Sperm Whale hanging off one side of a whaling ship with the head of a Right Whale hanging off the other side. I’m sure more than one reader has wished these apparent digressions gone and the novel turned into a 280-page adventure novel.
But I must confess that, having re-read Melville’s classic just for the sake of considering it for my list of “lovable” books, I found these digressive chapters a significant contribution to the pleasure of the novel rather than a distraction. Aside from their giving the reader a crash course in Whaling 101, and so making him better able to appreciate the milieu of the story itself, they give us an impression of the narrator Ishmael, writing this novel having retired from many years as a whaler, using the opportunity to unload on his readers the entire content of his thoughts. He speaks with a tongue-in-cheek humor and a kind of armchair—or sea-chest—philosophy that sees meanings in the smallest or most everyday incidents of life, as in the chapter where Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat, and the narrator interprets “its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg’s sword chance.” Nor is the narrator’s speculation about the possible hunting of whales to extinction without significant import in today’s world.
But of course it’s the narrative itself that pulls readers in and keeps them anticipating that ultimate denouement. That narrative begins as Ishmael, the narrator and like his biblical namesake a kind of misanthrope, comes to Nantucket looking to sign on as a seaman on whaling ship. In order to stay at an inn in New Bedford, he is forced to share a bed with the harpooneer Queequeg, a tattooed South-Sea islander who worships a small wooden idol and is a possible cannibal. Nevertheless, Queequeg becomes Ishmael’s close friend, and the two sign on to the whaling vessel the Pequod. The ship’s owners explain that the Pequod’s captain, Ahab, is unwell but should soon be ready to embark on a three years’ whaling voyage. The captain, it seems, has been recovering from an encounter with a large sperm whale that took off the captain’s leg below the knee. Once the ship actually sets sail, Captain Ahab informs his crew that this will not be a typical whaling voyage. His goal, and therefore the chief goal of all his crew, will be to hunt down and kill that same whale that maimed him at their last encounter: a great white whale known among whaling ships by the name Moby Dick.
The ship makes its way across the Atlantic, round the Cape of Good Hope and through the Indian Ocean, past Japan and into the South Pacific. The crew hunt whales along the route and readers are given detailed descriptions of how whales are hunted, how they are then butchered for their oil and how the oil is stored. Along the way the Pequod meets nine other whaling vessels, all of whom are hailed by Ahab’s call of “Has’t seen the White Whale?” All the time Ahab seems to become more and more obsessive in this search. He is shadowed everywhere by a silent Parsee named Fedallah, whom he has secretly brought aboard as his personal harpooneer. He has the blacksmith forge a new harpoon for his personal use out of horseshoe nails, the hardest metal he knows, and has the hot barb cooled in the blood of the ship’s three harpooneers: Queequeg. Tashtego (an American Indian) and Daggoo (an African harpooneer now living in Nantucket). Ishmael and Queequeg notice these things, but the first mate Starbuck is the most keenly aware of his captain’s growing madness, though he cannot bring himself to take any action against Ahab, preferring to try to bring him to his senses by verbal persuasion.
The final two vessels encountered by the Pequod have both had recent skirmishes with Moby Dick. The first of these, the Rachel, is frantically searching for a lost boat that had separated from the others during their futile attempt to capture the White Whale. The captain begs Ahab to help find the lost men, one of whom is the captain’s own son. The resolute Ahab refuses, thinking only of the revenge he wants to take against the whale, now within his reach. Soon after, the Pequod meets the ironically named Delight, which is badly damaged and has lost five men to the fury of the White Whale. Ahab asks if they have killed the whale, but the captain says the harpoon that could kill Moby Dick has not been forged—at which Ahab brandishes his special weapon and continues his mad pursuit.
There is a final moment just before the whale is encountered, when Ahab displays a spark of human feeling with Starbuck. He’s wasted forty years whaling, Ahab muses, and has barely ever seen his wife and son, whom Starbuck seems to remind him of. Starbuck urges the captain to leave off this mad pursuit and return to Nantucket where they can both see their families again. But Ahab crosses the deck instead to stand beside the shadowy Fedallah. And once Moby Dick is sighted, Ahab thinks only of the whale and his revenge. In case you don’t know the story I won’t say any more. But the epic battle with the White Whale takes three days, and fills the final three chapters of the novel.
There are myriad entrances into the complex text of Moby-Dick. One of the most obvious is the biblical influence on Melville: Besides Ishmael, Ahab is of course the name of the wicked king of Israel who introduced the worship of false gods (Baal and Asherah) among the Israelites—an act that may parallel Captain Ahab’s leading his crew away from their duty to the pursuit of the “false god,” the White Whale. Ishmael and Queequeg are assailed in Nantucket by a strange man who follows them and proclaims that some dire fate will befall them if they follow Captain Ahab: the ”prophet’s” name is Elijah—the biblical prophet who cries out against King Ahab in the Bible. The Rachel, the ship searching for her lost children, bears the name of Jacob’s wife in Genesis, who weeps for her own lost children. And of course Melville makes great use of Jonah—devoured by the whale for failing to heed the voice of his God.
The novel is epic in scope, and in considering the book’s genre that may be the first possibility that comes to mind. This is not surprising when one considers the fact that Melville had acquired a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1849, when he was in the midst of writing Moby-Dick, and made copious marginal notes on the text. Like the Romantic poets earlier in his century, Melville seems to have considered Satan the hero of Milton’s epic, and Ahab owes much to the rebellious fallen Angel, in his pride, in his obsession with and resentment of the great power that has defeated him. Melville’s Ahab even tells his crew that he is “proud as Lucifer” and “damned in the midst of Paradise.” But the demonic associations do not end here: Melville was also aware of Goethe and the epic drama of the Faust legend, and the character of Fedallah in Moby-Dick seems to be Ahab’s Mephistopheles—or perhaps a personification of his obsession with vengeance (for of course, we can also read Moby-Dick as a psychological study of obsession).
This obsession with vengeance suggests another way of reading the novel: it has elements of the Revenge Tragedy popular in early modern English drama. Some elements common to that genre include an avenger taking on the mission of revenge as a kind of sacred duty—a motivation that might be ascribed to Ahab; and a character, usually the avenger, who becomes mad or feigns madness—again, an apt description of Ahab, certainly as Starbuck or Ishmael sees him.
Yet Moby Dick can also be seen as another kind of renaissance tragedy, a tragedy of ambition. In such a tragedy, the hero, like Doctor Faustus, becomes so focused on attaining some great ambition that he ultimately falls through his own hubris. Ahab, focused on his belief in his own predestined defeat of the whale, is betrayed by his own overconfidence.
It should come as no surprise that Melville was deep into the study of Shakespeare’s great tragedies as he worked on his own magnum opus. Surely he had Hamlet in mind as he depicted the madness of Ahab as he pressed monomaniacally for revenge on the White Whale. And Macbeth, Shakespeare’s own most famous tragedy of ambition, is clearly in Melville’s mind when, late in the novel, the enigmatic Fedallah predicts that he will die before Ahab; that Ahab must see two hearses before his death (one not made by human hands and the other made of American wood), and finally that Ahab can only be killed by hemp. Such predictions feed Ahab’s false sense of confidence in facing Moby Dick, just as the witches’ prophecies of “Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane” and “None of woman born” mislead Macbeth. Nor is King Lear left out of Melville’s Shakespearian-inspired intertextuality, as Ahab rages against a storm toward the end of the novel, and in sympathy takes under his wing the African-American cabin boy Pip, who leapt in fear from a whaleboat and, stranded in the open sea was rescued again only by chance, and after he’d gone mad—much as Lear protects his poor Fool.
Nor is it only in the situations of the novel the Melville emulates the Bard of Avon. At times his language too rises to the heights of Shakespearean power. In a 2007 Longman edition of the novel, editors John Bryant and Haskell Springer say “above all, Moby-Dick is language: nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological, alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic and unceasingly allusive.” Of these, the most memorable are some of Ahab’s speeches, like Hamlet’s soliloquies or Satan’s mighty lines from the first books of Paradise Lost, full of power, allusion, rhythm and charisma. You cannot read Ahab’s explanation of his need for vengeance without seeing it as the human struggle against a hostile universe in microcosm:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
Ahab’s later speech to Starbuck concerning chance, free will and predestination, another major concern of the novel is no less remarkable than Hamlet’s “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” or Cassius’ “not in our stars but in ourselves”:
“Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”
But now I am waxing poetic to an extent beyond which this review probably need not go. It’s time to let the Pequod go to its watery grave. Let me just ended by thanking Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated Moby-Dick. After Melville met Hawthorne and read his Mosses from the Old Manse, he was inspired to make the book he was working on, Moby-Dick, something more, and more profound, than a simple whaling story. He wanted to be Hawthorne when he grew up. And in Moby-Dick, he reached intellectual maturity.