MOBY-DICK
by Herman Melville

INTRODUCTION

It is now 150 years since Herman Melville wrote his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. When the book appeared in 1851, Melville had achieved great success, chiefly as the author of the South Sea adventure novels Typee and Omoo. But Moby-Dick was both a critical and financial failure. Reviewers, with a few exceptions, were baffled by what seemed an incongruous mixture of Shakespearean drama, metaphysical speculation, matter-of-fact essays on the history and nature of whaling, and the highly poetical narrative of a monomaniacal captain in pursuit of a malevolent white whale. Indeed, the publication of Moby-Dick marked not the high point of Melville's career but the beginning of its decline.

Ironically, it may be that the very qualities that made Moby-Dick so perplexing to 19th century audiences are precisely what readers today find so extraordinary: its ransacking of philosophical, religious, and mythic traditions; its ability to encompass widely various registers of language, from a "flattened" scientific prose to the most rhapsodic poetry; its circling and infinitely digressive structure; and especially its highly self-conscious interrogation of the nature of meaning. Readers today are in many ways more aesthetically attuned to the strategies of Moby-Dick than Melville's contemporaries would have been.

What may seem more difficult for us to accept—a vengeful sperm whale repeatedly attacking its pursuers—would have been immediately recognizable to Melville's first readers. Just such an attack had occurred to the Nantucket whaleship Essex in 1820 and had been made famous through several accounts, including one written by a member of the crew who had survived it. Although not published until the 20th century, this line was penned by the 15-year-old cabin boy who was steering the Essex at the time of the attack, "I, being at the helm, and looking on the windward side of the ship, saw a very large whale approaching us. I called out to the mate to inform him of it... I heard a loud cry from several voices at once—that a whale was coming a-foul of the ship. Scarcely had the sound of their voices reached my ears when it was followed by a tremendous crash."

In 1840 Melville read the memoir of Owen Chase, first mate on the Essex, and had been profoundly affected by the tale. In Moby-Dick, particularly in his handling of the climactic scenes of the whale's attack, Melville drew on a number of details from Chase's narrative. It was reported that Chase, like Ahab, eventually sought to revenge himself upon the whale that had sunk his ship. And in what seemed a case of life imitating art, in 1851, the year of Moby-Dick's publication, the whaleship Ann Alexander was rammed and sunk by a whale in the same waters where the Essex had suffered a similar fate. When Melville heard the news, he exclaimed in a letter: "Ye Gods, what a commentator is this Ann Alexander whale... I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster."

In the century and a half since then, Moby-Dick has continued to attract commentators, enough to fill, if not to sink, a very large ship. Like the great whale it immortalizes, the novel seems uncontainable, yet demands interpretation. And like all works of literature that endure, Moby-Dick reaches beyond its own time. It invites contemporary readers into what is by now a very alien world and makes that world feel strangely familiar; and it continues to reach into our world, illuminating it in ways we might not expect. Certainly Ahab is a character none of us is likely to encounter today. And yet, in his self-destructive obsession he embodies characteristics of the human mind we all share, to one degree or another, at the end of the 20th century. "He piled upon the white whale's hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." Indeed, what makes Ahab at once repulsive and compelling is that he reduces his suffering to a single source and pursues it relentlessly.

At the other human extreme is the novel's charming narrator, Ishmael, a man of remarkably agile wit and intelligence. Far from being fixated on a single idea, Ishmael offers his attention equally to all the wondrous and horrific phenomena that pass before his eyes on his strange journey. If Ahab embodies irrational obsession, Ishmael is above all a man of reason, tolerance, and equilibrium. He espouses what may sound to some contemporary ears like cultural relativism. "I have no objection to any person's religion," he says, "so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it also." When forced to share his bunk with the "savage" Queequeg, he tells himself: "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." Inquisitive, adaptable, observant, always questioning but always striving to make meaning of what he sees around him, it is no accident that Ishmael alone survives of the Pequod's crew, turning an unused coffin into a makeshift lifeboat and floating to safety in the last of the book's many grand ironies. No other character could tell the tale in all its complexity. No other voice could continue to speak to readers as far removed as we are today and make the story real and relevant to us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819 into a family of illustrious lineage. Both of Melville's grandfathers had played significant roles in the Revolutionary War. His mother's father, Peter Gansevoort, achieved distinction for his defense of Fort Stanwix in Rome, New York, while his paternal grandfather, Thomas Melville, claimed to have been the first to throw tea into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party and later served as a major in General Washington's army.

Herman was raised in the genteel world of New York society, a world of servants and high culture. But in 1830, when he was only 11, his father's import business went bankrupt and the family, which now included eight children, was forced to flee to Albany to escape creditors. Two years later, Allan Melville died, and Herman and his older brother were pulled from school to help support the family. From then on, Herman (whom his father had described as "backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension") was largely self-taught. Over the next five years, Melville struggled to find a vocation, working as a bank clerk, a farmhand, a clerk in his brother's cap and fur store, and as a schoolteacher in Pittsfield and Albany.

Both his father and uncle had regaled him as a child with stories of their sea voyages, and in 1839 the twenty-year old Melville shipped out for London as a "cabin boy" on the St. Lawrence. In 1841, seeking further adventures, Melville took a step which would prove decisive for his future as a writer—he signed on the whaler Acushnet and set sail from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on a three-year whaling voyage. During a gam in the Pacific Melville happened to meet William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, first mate on the ill-fated Nantucket whaler Essex. William loaned Melville a copy of Owen Chase's account of the disaster that had befallen the Essex. It told how their ship had been attacked by an eighty-foot white whale, how the whale had rammed the ship deliberately and repeatedly, "with fury and vengeance," completely staving in its bows. Chase's narrative also recounted, in harrowing detail, how the men of the Essex spent the next 93 days on the open ocean in battered whaleboats, an ordeal that would end in the deaths of all but a handful of the original crew. "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea," Melville recalled, "and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me." Nearly ten years later it would provide the spark for Moby-Dick.

After eighteen months at sea, Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he spent several weeks living among a tribe of cannibals, the Typees. Melville escaped aboard a whaler, the Lucy Ann, made his way to Tahiti and Hawaii, and finally joined the navy, in August 1847, sailing for New York on the U.S.S. United States. Once back in Albany, Melville began to mine these experiences in a series of books that would bring him remarkable success in the 1840s, particularly in England: Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Mardi (1849), all based on Melville's travels in the South Seas; Redburn (1849) a semi-autobiographical account of Melville's first experience as a sailor in the merchant marine; and White-Jacket (1849) whose notoriety derived partly from its attack on flogging, then common in the navy. The book was even given to Congressmen who were considering enacting laws to forbid the practice.

In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw of Boston, the daughter of close family friend and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Lemuel Shaw. The young couple settled in New York City, where Melville hoped to make a living from his writing. But in 1850, during a summer spent at the family farm in the Berkshires, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become an important friend, and decided to move to Pittsfield, Massachusetts where he would live for the next thirteen years. Here Melville finished Moby-Dick and the other two novels that now form the core of the Melville canon—Pierre; or the Ambiguities and The Confidence Man, all of which were enormous critical and financial disappointments.

Indeed, by 1856 it was clear to Melville that his career as a novelist was finished. Unable to support his family through writing magazine stories and farming, Melville moved his family back to New York and became a customs inspector, a position he held for twenty years. During the last decades of his life, ignored by both the public and the literary elite, he devoted himself to poetry, producing five self-published volumes. When he died in 1891 at the age of 72, he was virtually unknown, and it was not until Billy Budd was found among his papers and published in 1924 that Melville's reputation underwent a major revival and Moby-Dick was elevated from obscurity to its current status as one of America's greatest novels.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in 1850, a time when many were predicting that America would fight a bloody civil war over slavery. In what ways can the novel be read as an oblique commentary on race, on America's self-destructive obsession with whiteness? How does the racial makeup of the Pequod, as well as Ishmael's friendship with Queequeg, reinforce such a reading?
    
2. Many readers have noted the pervasive influence of Shakespeare on Melville. Of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes—Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello—whom does Ahab most resemble? Does Ahab, like other tragic heroes, arouse both pity and terror? Does Moby-Dick differ in important ways from Shakespearean and Greek tragedy?
    
3. Queequeg is one of the most intriguing characters in Moby-Dick and figures prominently in the novel's early chapters. Ishmael describes him as a "sagacious savage" who resembles George Washington "cannibalistically developed." He admires Queegueg's "serenity," his self-possession, his ability to be "content with his own company." Why has Melville developed Queequeg so vividly? How does he illuminate the more "civilized" characters, Ahab in particular?
    
4. In "The Try Works," Ishmael quotes Solomon's statement that "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead." In what ways is Moby-Dick a novel about understanding—observing, interpreting, making meaning—and the failure to understand? Where would you place Ishmael and Ahab on the spectrum of understanding?
    
5. Early in the voyage, Ahab tells Starbuck: "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. Who's over me?" But before the final battle with the whale he claims that "This whole act's immutably decreed... I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders." Is Ahab guilty of a kind of Promethean hubris or is he tragically fated to do what he does? Are these positions contradictory?
    
6. There are no women in Moby-Dick. Whaling was of course a strictly male enterprise, but what consequences may be said to follow from the absence of women from this world? Do you find a displacement of sexual energies in the novel? How would you make sense, in this context, of Ahab's deformity?
    
7. Moby-Dick alternates between precise, often matter-of-fact descriptions of whaling and the extravagant, almost mythic actions of Ahab and his crew. Do these disparate elements enhance each other? If so, how so?
    
8. One contemporary reviewer complained that Moby-Dick was an "intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, bad sayings..." Another early critic described Melville as containing two writers: "the one sensible, sagacious, observant, graphic, and producing admirable matter—the other maundering, driveling, subject to paroxysms, cramps, and total collapse, and penning exceeding many pages of unaccountable 'bosh'." Are these criticisms in any way justified? If so, how has Moby-Dick transcended its flaws to become and remain a masterpiece?
    
9. In "The Sermon," Melville establishes the story of Jonah and the whale as a backdrop for Ahab's later actions. How does Jonah's story both parallel and provide a counterpoint to Ahab's?
    
10. The novel begins with Ishamael sharing a room with Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, run by Peter Coffin. At the end, Ishmael survives the wreck of the Pequod by climbing aboard Queequeg's unused coffin. What might Melville be suggesting through these parallels?
     
11. In "Stubb's Supper," Stubb instructs "Fleece," the ship's aged black cook, to preach to the sharks feasting noisily on the remains of a whale tied alongside the Pequod. Fleece exhorts them to "Stop dat dam smackin' ob de lip!" and to curb their voraciousness. He concludes that "if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned." An example of Melville's comic genius, how does Fleece's sermon to the sharks relate to the larger themes of the novel? What other instances of comedy do you find in Moby-Dick? Of a satiric treatment of Christianity?
     
12. Melville wrote Moby-Dick during a period when Emerson, Thoreau, and others were developing a Transcendentalist philosophy and extolling the spiritual benefits of living in nature. In what ways can the novel be seen as an argument against such views? How would you characterize nature in Moby-Dick? What view of life, suffering, redemption, does Melville seem to be dramatizing? Is this view relevant or attractive to our time?

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