Was Melville alluding to wars with Native Americans in Moby Dick?

On the whole I think the book, and Ahab,s story in particular, is about the inner self rather than events happening or about to happen outside it in 1850's America. It is about obsession that drives out reality.
This is reflected in the feeling of unreality the Pequod sails in. The ship is part of Ahab, he is conjoined with it down through his leg into a socket drilled into the deck. The ship is his body, the crew are carried along in Ahab and Ahab is damaged. Part of him was ripped and carried away by the Whale (not only his leg) but in Melville's parlence, his soul. In that way he is also conjoined with Moby Dick. As he says himself - only Ahab can conjour him up. (Which he has been doing throughout the book, long before he is actually sighted.) He is seeking to wrest his soul back from the whale.

Now, the other day I was watching a quiz on telly, and this question came up: “Who was told by Tiresias he would have a long life unless he saw and recognised himself ?” The answer was Narcissus. “Ah” thinks I. “Another harpoon to cast at Moby Dick.” Narcissus is mentioned at the very beginning of the book. His own image draws him to his watery death. Is that what Ahab is doing?

ps. There is some Macbeth in there too.

A nice interpretation, prendrelemick!

What I mean is that Moby Dick is a book that grows with Melville. It is born as project more similar to his previous works, which have some basis on other stories and Melville experience. Those experience certainly enlarge Melville formation, but it was only when he was pursuing his own White Whale he found the "muse" that allowed him to step foward and attempt such complex (and radical) literary experience, which also reflects on the themes of the book. One has to wonder how much Hawthorne friendship helped Melville.

Yet, he never abandoned this "realism", he kept using previous incidents to basis his novels. Melvile was never an art for art kind of author, he has a moralist side, and deemed that literature must be real. (This is of course something relevant for XX century, when Conrad also suggest something similar.) There are other examples where Melville works with social-political concerns. I already mentioned Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, but there is Mardi a distopian novel, showing an allegory of America where leaders screw up the place (a socialist community of sorts) or Gees, a satyre in Swift style dealing with racism towards portuguese sailors that had a colony nearby.

Melville is very weary of leaders. I always feel he is some sort of Dark spiritual brother of Whitman (perhaps Melville moralism, religiousity, perhaps he is a Poetman author). Also, he is very Shakespearean. I would say, the most shakespearean novelist ever. (Ahab is different from every character, he is not part of the action, he comes into scene). I would say this make me think twice about turning the Pequod in a character or part of Ahab. It is more a scenary for Ahab (one that he is able to have influence). I feel a bit like Lear and the old "the madness of the king, the madness of the kingdom" approach. The crew cannot, of course, leave the kingdom, no more than the peasants. They must go all the way with the king.

I know nothing of Melville or his other works, I have only read Moby Dick. I am aware of Billy Budd because I saw the opera many years ago and know something something of its political slant. And that's about it. You are making points way above my level. But your last couple of sentences are along the same lines as I was thinking.

Before casting another harpoon at Moby Dick, I suggest go hunting those other works (mostly Billy Budd, Benito Cereno and Bartebly). They are shadowed by Moby Dick, but any author who had only those 3 in their biography, would be already remembered as one of the best novelists. In many aspects the white while draws melville to the depth with her, leaving behind a shadow over his other works and sometimes it seems he was an "one hit wonder". Nothing like this, even when we notice he tries hard to not be dragged by Moby Dick while working those other novels, because of the heavy criticism he received.

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Originally Posted by kev67

I just finished the book. I was worried Moby Dick might not survive the final confrontation.

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Congratulations, Kev. And I beg your pardon. I (stupidly) did not even consider that you might not have known know how Moby-Dick ended. I'm glad to see that you stayed away from the site as you were finishing the novel, and I hope that I didn't spoil anything for you. I apologize if I did.

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Originally Posted by kev67

As far as I can tell he did, although all those ropes, harpoons and corpses might slow him down. How's he going hunt giant squid encumbered by all that?

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No doubt he'll use them as fishing lines. Squid love human flesh.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

We can guess they are the denial of heroic pursuit. The model of scrivener, hiding from god presence (can you say they are the Limbo? :D ) Or they are other nations/societies that do not move toward greatness/madness? Because they may represent humanity but not all humanity.

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I reread several chapters last night. It struck me that Ahab and Boomer, the captain of the Samuel Enderby, are being closely contrasted vis a vis the captain-like Father Mapple, whose sermon on Jonah advised acceptance of God's will however fearsome or inscrutable. Ahab and Boomer have both been permanently damaged by Moby-Dick. Boomer lost his arm to a harpoon sticking from the whale's side; he wears a whalebone arm to match Ahab's whalebone leg. Boomer has spotted Moby-Dick twice since that encounter but always given him a wide berth. "He's best let alone," he councils Ahab. "What is best let alone," Ahab counters, "that accursed thing is not always what least allures.” He goes on to compare Moby-Dick to a magnet.

There is more going on here than Ahab's obsession or Boomer's prudence. Mapple's broad shadow (the Mapple episode is given three chapters) makes it a question of free will and opens the question of where Melville stands on the issue. It is all well and good to speak of Ahab's indomitable will, but how much will is really being exercised by that which a magnet draws? Is Ahab's famed will ultimately illusory? And does this relate to the central paradox of life being unimportant without heroic action (cf the pale usher of Etymology) but heroic action failing to redeem--or to achieve much else.

Before I reread the chapters I mention above, I noticed and wondered about a passage in the novel's first chapter:

"Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage...yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."

Is Melville being ironic? Or does he genuinely believe that free will is a delusion? Is it part of Ahab's delusion?

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

I think of Walt Whitman. Besides Whitman, the Pequod is the perhaps the most meaningful literary map of america, of democracy, of representation, individualy and entreprise. Yet, Melville is dark. What is dark? Perhaps some sensibility towards the upcoming civil war also gives him some fear about the leadership. Like I said, In Benito Cereno Melville seems to be talking about the possible upcoming violence after the end of slavery. It may be that artistic sensibility that give writers the capacity to feel for a time that didnt exist yet.

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The glorious thing about Melville is that he is an American 19th-century literary voice that is completely pessimistic. I suppose Poe's was, too, but Melville's voice seems more authentically American than writers like Poe and Hawthorne who were often trying to sound European. Whitman saw the horror of the war close up and was still exuberant about the American potential. Moby-Dick was starkly pessimistic, but remember that it failed commercially and arguably ended Melville's career as a popular writer. Americans weren't ready for that kind of pessimism until the 20th century.

I don't think The pessimism in Moby Dick has anything to do with the Civil War, by the way. The novel was published a decade before. There were some nasty things going on: Millard Fillmore was enforcing the fugitive slave act by sending federal troops after runaway slaves who had long resided in the North; violent skirmishes were breaking out with their defenders. We like to say in retrospect that the war was inevitable because slavery had been winked at during the constitutional convention, but in fact it was brought on by a sudden secession crisis following Lincoln's election. Southern states had long bluffed about seceding if they didn't get their way in national elections, but Melville could not have known in 1851 that actual secession would come, or that the president would send troops to suppress it, or that it would lead to a holocaust that would destroy the South and leave the north forever changed. None of that was a given in 1860 (far from it). And even the most farsighted writer would not have guessed it in 1851.

Melville is sometimes said to have predicted the war in a poem called The Portent, in which he calls the hanging of the abolitionist guerrilla John Brown "the meteor of the war," but the poem was not published until 1866, a year after the war ended. I don't know when he wrote the poem, but Brown was not hanged until the end of 1859. Melville's pessimism prior to 1851 (when Moby-Dick was published) certainly had nothing to do with Brown. In the 1840s and 1850s, the country itself was not nearly as pessimistic about what was coming as it should have been.

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Originally Posted by prendrelemick

On the whole I think the book, and Ahab,s story in particular, is about the inner self rather than events happening or about to happen outside it in 1850's America.

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I strongly agree about the latter point. My rereading of the chapters about the other ships has even made me a little sympathetic about your ideas about the inner self. A complex symbol can, of course, work on several levels; the Pequod, for example, can be a macrocosm of the human psyche as well as a microcosm of humanity itself (or just a good ol' Yankee whaler). E.M. Forster once said something to the effect that Moby Dick is a book with hundreds of symbols, but what it means is another matter. :)

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Originally Posted by prendrelemick

It is about obsession that drives out reality.
This is reflected in the feeling of unreality the the Pequod sails in. The ship is part of Ahab, he is conjoined with it down through his leg into a socket drilled into the deck. The ship is his body, the crew are carried along in Ahab. Part of Ahab was ripped and carried away by the Whale (not only his leg) but in Melville's parlence, his soul. In that way he is also conjoined with Moby Dick. He is seeking to wrest it back again.

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Your idea about the Pequod being an extension of Ahab's body is brilliant and a bit creepy. It could also be interpreted that Ahab is bound to the physical world of the ship even as he is drawn to confront the ineffable mystery that lies beneath the Moby-Dick's facade. But again, it works on both levels.

Ahab is bound to Moby-Dick not only by the loss of his leg but also by the whalebone leg he had replaced it with. But whether this actually constitutes, as you say, "in Melville's parlance, his soul," or whether that is part of the delusion that drives him against the whale--in contrast to Captain Boomer, who has also lost a limb to Moby-Dick and replaced it with one of whalebone. Boomer accepts the loss of his arm as God's will. Ahab, the "Godless and Godlike man" cannot let it go. His defiance may or may not be heroic, but in the end it avails him nothing. Moby-Dick gets him body and soul.

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Originally Posted by prendrelemick

Now the other day I was watching a quiz on telly, and this question came up: “Who was told by Tiresias he would have a long life unless he saw and recognised himself ?” The answer was Narcissus. “Ah” thinks I. “Another harpoon to cast at Moby Dick.” Narcissus is mentioned at the very beginning of the book. His own image draws him to his watery death. Is that what Ahab is doing?

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Bravo. I noticed the same passage last night and even highlighted it. Melville is discussing the draw that bodies of water have on people, so it is not necessarily about Ahab attempting to recover his soul from Moby-Dick:

"And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned."

I find the immediately following line more pertinent to Ahab:

"But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."

So even the image we take to be ourselves is only an "ungraspable phantom." In the same way, I think, any notion Ahab may have about wresting his soul back from Moby-Dick is just a part of his greater delusion. There is certainly narcissism in Ahab's obsessive need for vengeance. But Moby-Dick just spouts and flips his tail at all of that. No wonder Ahab hates him so much.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

I reread several chapters last night. It struck me that Ahab and Boomer, the captain of the Samuel Enderby are being closely contrasted vis a vis the captain-like Father Mapple, whose sermon on Jonah advised acceptance of God's will however fearsome or inscutible. Ahab and Boomer have both been permanently damaged by Moby-Dick. Boomer lost his arm to a harpoon sticking from the whale's side; he wears a whalebone arm to match Ahab's whalebone leg). Boomer has spotted Moby-Dick twice since that encounter but always given him a wide berth. "He's best let alone," he councils Ahab. "What is best let alone," Ahab counters, "that accursed thing is not always what least allures.” He goes on to compare Moby-Dick to a magnet.

There is more going on here than Ahab's obsession or Boomer's prudence. Mapple's broad shadow (the Mapple episode is given three chapters) makes it a question of Freewill will and opens the question of where Melville stands on the issue. It is all well and good to speak of Ahab's indomitable will, but how much will is really being exercised by that which a magnet draws? Is Ahab's famed will ultimately illusory? And does this relate to the central paradox of life being unimportant without heroic action (cf the pale usher of Etymology) but heroic action failing to redeem--or to achieve much else.

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I think that is tragic, heroic. While the heroes cannot avoid fate, it is their actions that will lead to them to such destiny. Ahab chooses to pursue his fate, believe in a different outcome, but that cannot be changed. But perhaps, the true matter is the decision of the crew to be part of Ahab quest.

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Before I reread the chapters I mention above, I noticed and wondered about a passage in the novel's first chapter:

"Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage...yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."

Is Melville being ironic? Or does he genuinely believe that free will is a delusion? Is it part of Ahab's delusion?

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Melville is able of irony, but I think Ahab is genuinelly tragic, except it is a Shakespearean, not classical, tragedy.

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The glorious thing about Melville is that he is an American 19th-century literary voice that is completely pessimistic. I suppose Poe's was, too, but Melville's voice seems more authentically American than writers like Poe and Hawthorne who apwere often trying to sound European. Whitman saw the horror of the war close up and was still exuberant about the American potential. Moby-Dick was starkly pessimistic, but remember that it failed commercially and arguably ended Melville's career as a popular writer. Americans weren't ready for that kind of pessimism until the 20th century.

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No, they are far from it. It is good to remember Poe was also rejected (less, Poe was popular) and inside Poe's mind, his balance came from activelly acting against the "good america", like some of his a bit out of hand controversies. Hawthorne is bleak, but he is more balanced and inside out, too much a moralist. The trio was a stark contrast to the intellectual balance of Emerson or Whitman Esctatic voice. However, I do see Poe as very american, specially if we look at his critical work: he was one of the first authors to think about the text as a format for a new kind of reader, he wanted an accessible publishing choice, etc, even if his more (much more) intellectual approach, often heavy handed.

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I don't think The pessimism in Moby Dick has anything to do with the Civil War, by the way. The novel was published a decade before. There were some nasty things going on: Millard Fillmore was enforcing the fugitive slave act by sending federal troops after runaway slaves who had long resided in the North; violent skirmishes were breaking out with their defenders. We like to say in retrospect that the war was inevitable because slavery had been winked at during the constitutional convention, but in fact it was brought on by a sudden secession crisis following Lincoln's election. Southern states had long bluffed about seceding if they didn't get their way in national elections, but Melville could not have known in 1851 that actual secession would come, that the president would send troops to suppress it, or that it would lead to a holocaust that would destroy the South and leave the north forever changed. None of that was given in 1860 (far from it). And even the most farsighted writer would not have guessed it in 1851.

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No, I do not think Moby Dick is an allegory of Civil War. I think his perception of the sittuation could have lead him to delve deeply in the subject, I also think he was reacting to conciously to the extreme positive vision that Whitman portraied. Melville just do not allow him to be "drunk" with the great democracy, despite his own experience allowing him to develop a more positive views of the diversity. Melville wasnt unware of the sittutioan (his godfather was one of the judges - no idea now the name of the position exactly - to determine runaway slaves should be brought back to their owners), he was not strained from what was happening. The prophetic tone of his work may help us to draw some "visionary" interpretation, but the point of the leadership mistrust is repeated in other works.

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Melville is sometimes said to have predicted the war in a poem called The Portent, in which he calls the hanging of the abolitionist guerrilla John Brown "the meteor of the war," but the poem was not published until 1866, a year after the war ended. I don't know when he wrote the poem, but Brown was not hanged until the end of 1859. Melville's pessimism prior to 1851 (when Moby-Dick was published) certainly had nothing to do with Brown. In the 1850s the country itself was not nearly as pessimistic about what was coming as it should have been.

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if I am not mistaken, his war poems are all after-war. Some sort of project he developed after visiting places where the conflict happened.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

if I am not mistaken, his war poems are all after-war. Some sort of project he developed after visiting places where the conflict happened.

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Thank you for that information, JC. I suspected it was a post-war observation (it's easy to recognize the meteors after the war), but I wasn't sure.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

It is all well and good to speak of Ahab's indomitable will, but how much will is really being exercised by that which a magnet draws? Is Ahab's famed will ultimately illusory? And does this relate to the central paradox of life being unimportant without heroic action (cf the pale usher of Etymology) but heroic action failing to redeem--or to achieve much else.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

I think that is tragic, heroic. While the heroes cannot avoid fate, it is their actions that will lead to them to such destiny. Ahab chooses to pursue his fate, believe in a different outcome, but that cannot be changed. But perhaps, the true matter is the decision of the crew to be part of Ahab quest.

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I agree that Ahab is a tragic hero, at least on the surface. My question is: does Melville really buy it? Does he see Ahab as defying God or fate by pursuing Moby-Dick (in contrast to Captain Boomer who accepts from the loss of an arm that "he is best left alone")? Or does he see him as deluded about his will? I guess I need to reread more and think more about Melville's theory of fate. In some ways, the passage below anticipates Tolstoy's ideas two decades later. Is Ahab another failed "great man," like Tolstoy's Napoleon, whose reputedly brilliant orders are not even reaching his troops? Is Melville (like Tolstoy) rejecting Carlisle, and is this the source of his apparent distaste for leaders?

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

Before I reread the chapters I mention above, I noticed and wondered about a passage in the novel's first chapter:

"Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage...yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment."

Is Melville being ironic? Or does he genuinely believe that free will is a delusion? Is it part of Ahab's delusion?

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

Melville is able of irony, but I think Ahab is genuinelly tragic, except it is a Shakespearean, not classical, tragedy.

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Almost. What is missing, in contrast with either classical or Shakespearian tragedy, is catharsis. We are left clinging to a coffin in the middle of a vast, unknowable sea: an devastating metaphor and critique of the human condition. It is as if Melville's pessimism overwhelms and subverts even the tragedy he has been telling. There is no redemption, only survival, and even that is arbitrary. GO ISHMAEL! :)

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

Thank you for that information, JC. I suspected it was a post-war observation (it's easy to recognize the meteors after the war), but I wasn't sure.

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There wouldnt be any good prophet otherwise :D

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I agree that Ahab is a tragic hero, at least on the surface. My question is: does Melville really buy it? Does he see Ahab as defying God or fate by pursuing Moby-Dick (in contrast to Captain Boomer who accepts from the loss of an arm that "he is best left alone")? Or does he see him as deluded about his will? I guess I need to reread more and think more about Melville's theory of fate. In some ways, the passage below anticipates Tolstoy's ideas two decades later. Is Ahab another failed "great man," like Tolstoy's Napoleon, whose reputedly brilliant orders are not even reaching his troops? Is Melville (like Tolstoy) rejecting Carlisle, and is this the source of his apparent distaste for leaders?

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I do not think Melville makes Ahab decisions a farse, as this would make his damning a farse too. Maybe it was unavoidable or maybe a dual possibility (like calvinism, but I think Melville disliked calvinism). As the great man, I think Melville activelly denies the great man notion, either be the Emerson benign verion of Carlyle version. I think we have to work with Melville own experiences again, how he manages to draw from them inspiration for something that grows universal. Melville had problem with authority, he was abandoned in an island after a failed mutiny. I think his distate for authority is something, let's say, pre-intellectual. I also think he is conciously being very romantic: he let himself be influenced by the precussors and yet works against them (in a dialogic form, Bakhtin notion). The difference with tolstoy, is of course, Melville more genuine affinity with the "average joe", because of Melville origem.

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Almost. What is missing, in contrast with either classical or Shakespearian tragedy, is catharsis. We are left clinging to a coffin in the middle of a vast, unknowable sea: an devastating metaphor and critique of the human condition. It is as if Melville's pessimism overwhelms and subverts even the tragedy he has been telling. There is no redemption, only survival, and even that is arbitrary. GO ISHMAEL! :)

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Well, maybe they cut the final, where Ishmael clings on the shripwreck, while the whale charges at him, with the mouth open, but he sees Ahab wooden leg still inside the beast mouth and with a harpoon he hits the wooden leg and the whale explodes? :D

It is a XIX century man, Nietzche is coming by the next door. Imagine if Melville had never fell from grace or was considered just an adveture writer until the XX century. The amount of writers who would have to bow down to his influence, even someone like Lovecraft.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

I do not think Melville makes Ahab decisions a farse, as this would make his damning a farse too.

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No, Ahab is a tragic hero and there is nothing farcical about him. There is some farce in the novel (the bedroom scene with Queequeg for example), and there are some truly funny one liners: "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed"; or (also of Queequeg): "He was an undergraduate."). But Ahab's story is not farce.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

Maybe it was unavoidable or maybe a dual possibility (like calvinism, but I think Melville disliked calvinism).

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I've heard different things. He had a very strict Protestant relative (grandmother?) in his life when he was growing up; maybe he was rebelling against Calvinism or maybe he just learned to think in those terms (or maybe both). I find it all a bit speculative. But some of the things Ishmael says (apparently speaking in earnest for Melville) are noticeably duelistic. For example: "Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

As the great man, I think Melville activelly denies the great man notion, either be the Emerson benign verion of Carlyle version.

The difference with tolstoy, is of course, Melville more genuine affinity with the "average joe", because of Melville origem.

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Yes, that is what I meant when I said that Melville sounded authentically American. Poe and Hawthorne were Americans, of course, but Melville "talked American." Melville talked Northeast (where I grew up) and Mark Twain talked Midwest (where I spent my boyhood summers).

I'm intrigued that Melville's ideas about fate may have been similar to Tolstoy's. I'll have to look into it.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

Well, maybe they cut the final, where Ishmael clings on the shripwreck, while the whale charges at him, with the mouth open, but he sees Ahab wooden leg still inside the beast mouth and with a harpoon he hits the wooden leg and the whale explodes? :D

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Or the one where Moby-Dick carries Ahab up the Empire State Building until he is knocked off by circling biplanes? :)

On the other hand, true tragedy/catharsis would only have been a matter of having Ahab kill Moby-Dick but die in the attempt (this was my father's interpretation of the ending). Ahab's obsessive vengeance would have wrought his own destruction and the sea would have been cleared of its big ol' scourge. But that was not the story Melville wanted to tell.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

It is a XIX century man, Nietzche is coming by the next door. Imagine if Melville had never fell from grace or was considered just an adveture writer until the XX century. The amount of writers who would have to bow down to his influence, even someone like Lovecraft.

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Yes, I made a similar point recently on another thread. But speculative history is useless. Fate is a funny thing, that's all.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

No, Ahab is a tragic hero and there is nothing farcical about him. There is some farce in the novel (the bedroom scene with Queequeg for example), and there are some truly funny one liners: "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed"; or (also of Queequeg): "He was an undergraduate."). But Ahab's story is not farce.

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I think Queequeq may be quite realistic in his actions. Also, it is very "In the navy" (Not the only novel Melville seems to allude to homossexuality in among the sailors, I guess he had somehow to make it a bit humurous to try to pass by). It is very whitmanesque. At sametime, a dig at the rousseau ideas about the pure and primitive state of man that was very typical on Romantics (and American literature with Feenimore Cooper). You obviously notice, while Queequeeq went to hunt Moby Dick, he will not sink with her. He is saved or at least, not damned. (And Ishmael is saved too, saved by Queequeeq?) because he abandons the hunt (in a sort of definitive way, but still).

Anyways, if Ahab is not a farce, his will is true. It is not strange that free will and predestination are contraditory. Church philosophers have been dealing with this contradiction for centuries. The way I see, Ahab choose to continue the hunt. It would not end that way if he had "accepted" his defeat, Job wise. By making that an obssession he offended the watever holy/profane was behind Moby Dick. Think about Dostoievisky and the idea that the ideal man is Jesus and that if you want to see the correct curse of action you had to think what Jesus would do. Not saying Ahab had to give the other leg, but pretty that had Jesus fought, cried, etc, he would end in the cross nevertheless and reborn in the 3th day, yet, everything would be different in terms of redemption... But I think Ahab's will is really true. It is like "I will hunt this whale, as you want, but it will be on my terms" and it is very natural he feels his acts were a conflict between his will and fate, in the parts you quoted. It is Jesus in the cross, questioning before drinking his death kind of approach.

[quote]I've heard different things. He had a very strict Protestant relative (grandmother?) in his life when he was growing up; maybe he was rebelling against Calvinism or maybe he just learned to think in those terms (or maybe both). I find it all a bit speculative. But some of the things Ishmael says (apparently speaking in earnest for Melville) are noticeably duelistic. For example: "Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."[/quoe]

Melville likes a lot of building those mixed up messages. In every book he seems to pull the reader to reflection because nothing is clear, there is always a double meaning (again a dialogic position) in the sittuations and dialogues. It seems to me that Melville wants to make truth something hard to be understood (difficulty of communication is something also typical on Melville novels). That is what puts him high with the likes of Dante or Shakespeare, Moby Dick is a work of multiple readings since the conception, because of the literary style and capacity of Melville. It is not just a matter of moral, he is doing in USA (except people didnt notice) what made the russians so famous about the novels. He is a Tolstoeisviski.

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Yes, that is what I meant when I said that Melville sounded authentically American. Poe and Hawthorne were Americans, of course, but Melville "talked American." Melville talked Northeast (where I grew up) and Mark Twain talked Midwest (where I spent my boyhood summers).

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I also think Melville is the only one of the 3 that is building something americans love to pursue (the great american novel), with all, an american myth, destruction and reconstruction of a previous model, a more universal theme... Hawthorne moralism makes him a bit more typical than universal, I guess.

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Or the one where Moby-Dick carries Ahab up the Empire State Building until he is knocked off by circling biplanes? :)

On the other hand, true tragedy/catharsis would only have been a matter of having Ahab kill Moby-Dick but die in the attempt (this was my father's interpretation of the ending). Ahab's obsessive vengeance would have wrought his own destruction and the sea would have been cleared of its big ol' scourge. But that was not the story Melville wanted to tell.

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I suppose Melville would be aware that such ending would close any debate and maybe give the impression man killed god. Also, killing the whale would look like a version of Killing the deer in he sea, no?

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

I think Queequeq may be quite realistic in his actions. Also, it is very "In the navy" (Not the only novel Melville seems to allude to homossexuality in among the sailors, I guess he had somehow to make it a bit humurous to try to pass by). It is very whitmanesque. At sametime, a dig at the rousseau ideas about the pure and primitive state of man that was very typical on Romantics (and American literature with Feenimore Cooper). You obviously notice, while Queequeeq went to hunt Moby Dick, he will not sink with her. He is saved or at least, not damned. (And Ishmael is saved too, saved by Queequeeq?) because he abandons the hunt (in a sort of definitive way, but still).

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Well, there is a lot going on with Queequeg. He is certainly a parody of Rousseau's noble savage. But he also expresses a sincere idea of Melville's which he (quite brilliantly) expresses as farce: however advanced "civilized man" imagines himself to be, he intimately shares this world (the symbol is the bed) with those who make him very uncomfortable; but the truth is that there is not a whole lot of difference between them. "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

The initial bedroom story is like a sailor's yarn that get's more and more outrageous. "The innkeeper said you'll have to double up with a harpooner, and I'm like, Woah, I don't know, but then, Okay, what the hell, where is he? And he says, Well he's out selling human heads, and I'm like, What? And he says, Aw, he's okay." The level of discomfort gets ratcheted up progressively (which is part of the farce), but it ends with Ishmael and Queequeg becoming "a cosy, loving pair." I agree that there is a homosexual bond, but the more important issue (for Melville) is the universality of the human condition. And he sees this as something common sailors, who travel the world and know its peoples, are more familiar with than those who sit in ivory towers and think they're better than others. (Okay, okay, there's an "In the Navy" thing going on, too :) ).

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

Anyways, if Ahab is not a farce, his will is true.

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Not necessarily. He could be deluded (like Oedipus and Macbeth, for example). It's not a binary distinction.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

The way I see, Ahab choose to continue the hunt. It would not end that way if he had "accepted" his defeat, Job wise. By making that an obssession he offended the watever holy/profane was behind Moby Dick.

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On the surface of it, Ahab and Boomer are both choosing. Boomer is choosing to abide by what he sees as fate or God's will, even though he doesn't want to. He wants to kill Moby-Dick for personal glory and profit. He tells Ahab: "There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone". But Ahab chooses to do what he wants, even in defiance of fate or divine will. That, I think is his sin (the same Jonah showed in leaving Nineveh in Father Mapple's sermon) rather than obsessiveness. So perhaps, for Melville, Ahab and Boomer (and Jonah and the rest of us) are free to do what we want, but we are not free to choose what it is that we want to do. Thus, for Ahab (and probably for Boomer, too), Moby-Dick is "a great magnet." But they choose different responses to his allure.

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

But I think Ahab's will is really true. It is like "I will hunt this whale, as you want, but it will be on my terms" and it is very natural he feels his acts were a conflict between his will and fate, in the parts you quoted. It is Jesus in the cross, questioning before drinking his death kind of approach.

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I don't see that analogy. If anything, the whale is Christ (albeit the wrathful version) and Ahab is party to a kind of Crucifixion at the end (is he the soldier who pierce's Christ's side with his lance?). But Ahab only damns himself, while Moby-Dick brings Judgement to the Pequod's world in microcosm. (But that doesn't quite work either, since Ishmael's deliverance is so arbitrary).

Ah, too many harpoons!

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

I suppose Melville would be aware that such ending would close any debate and maybe give the impression man killed god. Also, killing the whale would look like a version of Killing the deer in he sea, no?

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My theory is he was keeping him alive for the sequel: Moby-Dick II: Ishmael's Revenge. (This time it's personal). That's a joke, but now that I think of it, perhaps Melville did envision a sequel but never wrote it because of the commercial failure of Moby-Dick. It would explain the lack of catharsis and the weird, radical ending. But I hope I'm wrong. The last scene in Moby Dick is one of my favorites in literature.

I apologise if I am falling behind here, but I've been flicking through the text.

Ahab may have been following his destiny, but in the End Moby Dick was just splashing around. On the first real sighting he didn't even notice the Pequod and Ahab, choc full with human conceits and infatuations, sneaking up on him. This was very striking to me, after such a build up I had expected Moby to be waiting, a picture of malevolence - " So we meet again Meester Ahab." Not so, he sheds his supernatural aura and becomes a very physical whale doing whaley things - I think this is deliberate by Mellville, and ties in with all the encyclopedic whale facts he has been serving up. Ishmael may engage in a bit of pathetic fallacy, but that is just more human conceit. The crew are about to get a deadly dose of the real world and discover they, in their human insolence, are insignificant.
The Mapple sermon tells us about a whale being used as God's instrument, and I think that is what Melville intended with Moby, but both whales are unaware creatures in themselves . Destiny and rights and wrongs are games we higher creatures play.