Originally Posted by
Pompey Bum
It is not the flesh that is inviolate--many harpoons have damaged it--but the whiteness itself, which Melville describes as "mystical and well nigh ineffable." He compares it to the ectoplasm of a ghost and the pale horse ridden by Death in Revelation. "It was the whiteness of the whale," he says, "that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught."
In my opinion, that is the key to the novel. The scars, the flesh, the whale form itself (and all the things we try to make of the whale) are a facade. But the ineffable purity--not the whale but the whiteness of the whale--is what Ahab obscenely (and heroically) tries to violate. But Moby-Dick remains awesome and unknowable.
That is my ending. But was it Melville's, and does Melville give us a choice? This gets to a question we haven't asked yet: did Moby-Dick survive the final combat? When I was a little boy, my father used to read me a child's picture-book version of the novel. One of the last images in it was of Ahab harpooning Moby-Dick while the whale spouted blood. I remember asking my dad if Moby-Dick survived. Oddly enough he told me, No, he got killed, but he took Ahab with him. Years later, of course, I discovered that Melville says nothing of the kind.
On the other hand, the whale makes no curtain call. He had already been injured, he was harpooned in the final combat, and he rammed the Pequod hard enough to break it to sink it (which would also have caused terrible injury). So was my father right? Or did Melville leave the answer up to the reader? I'd be interested to hear your view. Mine is that my father was wrong. Moby-Dick triumphed and survived and Melville intended no ambiguity about it. God can destroy man but man cannot destroy God. What do you think?
