Ahab to Mr. Starbuck in "MobyDick"

[Pythagorean]

(in the captains quarters)

Ahab:

"Why are you wearing that long face, are you not game for MobyDick?"

Starbucks:

"...I came here to hunt whales not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels of sperm oil will that vengeance yield? What will it fetch on the New Bedford market?"

Ahab:

"Money's not the measure, man. It will fetch me a great premium, 'here' (Ahab, pointing to his heart)."

Starbucks:

"To be enraged at a dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct is blasphemous."

Ahab:

"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. ..Look 'ere Starbuck... All visible objects are but as paste-board masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me. He heaps me! Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate. The malignant thing that has plaqued and frightened man since time began. The thing that mauls and mutilates our race - not killing us outright but letting us live on with half a heart and half a lung!"

[William]

Pyth, great excerpt. What do you think Melville was alluding to in his using the "White Whale" to represent. Taking into consideration the mixture of he crew aboard this ill fated voyage to reach reconsiliation or even the score so to speak. Man's insatiable search for justice alluding to the dominate "white control" in the world? This is just a notion, if you don't mind, I would like to hear what you think? I do not mean to cast aspersions on the white race. I am white myself, but I think it is significant in that the whale was "white". Just a thought.

Thanks,
William

[Pythagorean]

William, I appreciate your thoughts..



It is my understanding that Melville held that the objects or things in the natural world were representations and not completely real things. These natural things come and go, they drift and change before our eyes. But there is something behind them which drives them, some natural motor. This inner nature is blasphemous precisely becuase it is purely natural. I understand Melville to be saying that behind these masks of appearances there lurks nothing but pure evil. And that is the status of nature. Captain Ahab was waging a war against evil itself in the guise of MobyDick.

--

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by William

Pyth, great excerpt. What do you think Melville was alluding to in his using the "White Whale" to represent

Ishmael gives an entire chapter on the subject in Chapter 42 -- he's quite explicit about it.

Moby Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville - Chapter 42 - The Whiteness of The Whale :: American Literature, Classic Books and Short Stories

In addition to all the positive and negative symbolism of whiteness, it serves two other roles. First, it allows Moby Dick to be tracked and identified -- to every passing ship Ahab asks the same thing: "Hast seen the white whale?"

Second, the novel was partly inspired by the true story of an aggressive harpoon-laden white sperm whale named Mocha Dick.

Mocha Dick - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[William]

There is so much that can be said. It could be interpreted that the fact that the whale was white, it represented to Ahab the inflicting evil that haunted him an that if he could conquer it, it would indeed cleanse him. He makes so many sybolistic references to "whiteness" as to purity, yet in this demon that represented the "stain" of humanity which he references to the Polar Bear, the shark and the albatross which represents the "ball and chain" around the neck of the purity of "white". That represents his obsession in that cleansing of his own soul and the battle between good and evil. It is in the white so deceptive that lurks that evil in the White Whale a reflection on Ahab himself in that he could not witness in himself such evil.

The gold coin represented temptation in that it turned the head of the multitude of the diverse assemblage of the crew aligning them and compelling them to follow suit in the quest for revenge giving it meaning and reward such as the "spoils of war" as it were blinding them even in the purity of the sun darking it purifying affect (of which was noted in then excerpt Paul quoted in the "Moby Dick" thread).

William

[Aedes]

In my mind the whiteness of the whale is most effective in portraying the whale as old, an old disgruntled creature of the sea -- just as Ahab is.

The whiteness probably came first from the reference to Mocha Dick. But because the novel is largely a work of symbolism, it's probable that Melville added on all the different facets of meaning. He makes it easy for us with Ishmael's meditation on whiteness, because it shows that he thought of every possible association with whiteness -- and therein prevents us from seizing on one of them.

[William]

I agree, but the peg leg was of the Whale, the scar was white representing his "infection" due to the life he had pursued in the killing of such a grand "beast". It think the entire book was about retribution. IMO.

William

[Aedes]

As best I can tell, the book is not so much about retribution as it is about a dark, self-destructive obsessiveness. Ahab sees his own end in his quest, he never speaks of looking beyond catching the whale, and when he speaks of his life he speaks only of regret. He renounces God (not perhaps specifically, but it's obvious that God isn't a source of any comfort or motivation), and is bent on dragging himself and everyone around him to hell. Melville makes a number of allusions to Dante's Inferno in the book; and Ahab in a striking way resembles the Satan from Paradise Lost.

[William]

As far as alluding to Milton and Dante, two authors whose works have never crossed my path, I am at a loss to make a comparison.

William

[Aedes]

Dante wrote The Divine Comedy (he wrote it roughly between 1310 - 1320), and it chronicles his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

John Milton was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and his greatest work is the epic poem Paradise Lost. In this poem Satan is a complex and tragic character. Two of his most famous lines could just as easily have been spoken by Ahab:

Tis better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven

and

Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven


I studied both authors and poems when I was in college, took a year long course in Dante and a semester in Milton. Great, great works of literature, just timeless.