Having been at sea for forty years, Ahab is the ideal Romantic hero; while Charles Darwin has yet to publish his Origin of the Species, Ahab certainly sees the world at sea as a “Survival of the Fittest.” Alienated from the comforts of traditional religiosity, he is finely tuned to nature and its effects on the human mind. He has seen the laws of nature defy the laws of God, and he has come to define the all-knowing Creator as a malevolent force. It is no surprise that Ahab chooses to unleash his internal battle with the spiritual unknown on nature's leviathan, the elusive white whale that took his own leg out from under him. In both philosophy and at sea, Ahab chooses to combat that which limits his intelligence and ability to create his own destiny.
Ahab's crusade is about more than simple revenge against the whale: “Transcending his recognition that he is only one small unit of suffering humanity, he imagines himself the representative of his race before the throne of God” (Bergstrom 176). He sees himself as a sort of martyr, as Adam “staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise” (Melville 427). His death is not suicide, but a sacrifice in judgment of God Himself. Ahab surrenders his ship, his crew, and his own life in defiance of the great unknowable, proudly hailing the endurance of humanity until the very end. His death gives his life purpose, and because he has died in commitment of a struggle he cannot win, his tale becomes legendary. By pitting himself against fate and its initiator, Ahab becomes a sort of god of the godless. He becomes a hero to those who share his curiosity of the divine, and whose thirsty minds fail to settle for limited knowledge and control regarding their fates.
Melville builds the foundation for Ahab's battle early in the novel with the image of two contrasting churches. Ishmael wanders into each of these houses of worship before setting out on the Pequod. The sermon in the first church refers to the “blackness of darkness,” and suggests that evil is impenetrable and cannot be understood by human beings (Melville 20). The sermon given by Father Mapple in the second church conveys the notion that God gives human beings the power to apprehend truth, and that they should proclaim that truth, even when it goes against conventional ways of thinking. Ironically, Father Mapple's words reflect Ahab's own struggle with accepting divine truth: “And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness obeying God consists” (Melville 45). Ahab's world is divided into two kinds of people: those who obey a God they may never personally know, and those who obey only themselves, as they are their own god. Obviously, Ahab falls in the latter category.
Beginning with his soliloquy in Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” Ahab contends that God is, in fact, a malevolent agency. He strives to defy limitations placed on human beings by conventional morality and religion, questioning God's right to have such complete control over his subjects. Ahab is generally not concerned with the morality of human beings. He is more affected by the agent who gave man intelligence, yet limited what he could come to learn. The captain easily exploits the morals of others, as he “is not concerned in the slightest with whether he is a good or evil man; the question just doesn't enter his mind. Ahab is hurt as men are hurt when a friend or parent whom they have counted on betrays them” (Booth 34). His goal is to ease the suffering of imperfect men by going to battle with their Creator. Robert F. Bergstrom states Ahab's purpose succinctly: “He who created those mysteries to baffle and frustrate mankind has offered His creatures an unendurable insult, and the only redress is to launch an implacable, even if futile, attack on the Deity” (175). Ahab concludes that God has been cruel to man, and that He, too, must answer to someone for His sins.
It is also in “The Quarter-Deck” that Ahab reveals to his crew that his mission is about more than just enacting revenge on the white whale for the loss of his leg. Like Ishmael, Ahab looks for hidden realities in everything around him. After Moby Dick almost premeditatedly bites off his leg, Ahab projects all of his perceptions regarding evil in the world onto the whale that attacked him. Comparing the whale to a wall shoved against him, he complains that “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” (Melville 138-139). Ahab finds a commonality between the unknowable God and the elusive white whale, and he transfers his anger of the first onto the latter, which is, in his view, possibly more tangible and combatable.
Even reasonable Ishmael tolerates the absurdity of Ahab's conviction, recognizing that many cultures believe in malignant forces in the world, as well. Despite the outrageousness of Ahab's quest for vengeance, Ishmael sympathizes with his disdain for the omnipotent God. He understands Ahab's torment well, and even justifies his transference of anger from God to the whale:
That intangible malignity … Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments … all truth with malice in it … all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white 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 (Melville 154).
Echoing Ahab's “eat or be eaten” ideology, Ishmael later speaks of the “universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began” (Melville 227). A fellow seaman, Ishmael, too, finds it easier to follow the laws of nature than to be lead blindly by the laws of the unknowable. Indeed, throughout Moby-Dick, life on a whaling ship takes on a sort of religion of its own. This religion supersedes the base religion of each man who boards the Pequod. Often times, a man must question or even sacrifice his personal convictions in order to contend with the demands of the religion of the sea.
Ahab's obsession with the whale is no more fanatical than a religious man's unquestioning obedience to his god. Melville makes this assertion with the inclusion of Father Mapple, a religious zealot who encourages his fellow Christians to seek out truth to the very end. When Ishmael enters Father Mapple's church, he notes that “each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the next, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable” (Melville 39). Despite the conviction with which he delivered it, “Father Mapple's creed seems neither to have erased the grief and fear from the hearts of the living nor to have united the congregation in their common fate” (Bergstrom 172). Ahab, on the other hand, becomes a master of manipulating men into thinking they are working towards a common fate. A distinct parallelism between Father Mapple and Ahab is seen in this passage, delivered by Father Mapple during his sermon:
Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! … Delight is to him – a far, far upward, and inward delight – who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges” (Melville 50).
These words could have come from the mouth of either Father Mapple or Ahab; they fit each man's worldly intentions. While Father Mapple encourages Christians to fight all opposition to proclaim the “truth” about God, Ahab desires to find evidence of this “truth,” which he, in fact, defines more as folly. Both men are steadfast in their separate convictions, but the language they use to describe their devotion to them is oddly similar. It is because of this shared passion for truth that Father Mapple and Ahab are equally monomaniacal. Both believe that God exists and that He has power over men's lives. Ahab only exceeds Father Mapple's fanaticism by attempting to literally go head-to-head with the unknowable. A creature of nature, “Ahab's 'mad' purpose is to destroy that which he seeks. In this he responds to the power of nature as he understands it” (Woodson 355). Ahab's monomania is driven by his natural predatory tendencies. This completely defies the passivity necessary to accept that fate is predetermined, which is what Father Mapple would recommend.
Melville elaborates on the dangers of fanaticism in Chapter 71, “The Jeroboam's Story”: “Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedeviling so many others” (Melville 257). Ahab believes that fate either doesn't exist, or if it does, we can't know about it. However, in the fatalism of his fellow seamen, he finds an opportunity to unite them for a common purpose. Throughout the novel, the real is often confused with the supernatural, precisely because Ahab exploits mystery and the unknown for his own ends. He easily manipulates his crew into accepting that the hunt for Moby Dick is their destiny: “Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” (Melville 141) By telling his crew that God expects them to hunt and kill Moby Dick, Ahab successfully invests them in his purpose.
One of Ahab's most obvious exploits of his crew's fatalism is in Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” when he directs his men's attention to the gold piece mounted at the head of the ship. He says the “round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's magic glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self” (Melville 346). The captain expects each man to gaze into the coin and find some sort of symbolism in it, with which he is to come to understand the crew's common destiny. Indeed, this trick helps further unite the men as they draw near the battlefield.
While Ahab uses others' belief in fate to manipulate them, he rejects the notion that it controls his own life. In defiance of fatalism, Ahab refuses to accept Fedallah's prophesy of death. He announces he will remain “immortal on land and on sea” and quickly dismisses the possibility that he should encounter a hearse or be hung by a hemp rope while on this voyage (Melville 395). When lightening hits the ship's sails, Ahab interprets the event as a sign of his power; pious Starbuck assumes that God opposes Ahab. The men on Ahab's ship constantly look for signs from God to determine their fate; Ahab simply helps them interpret these signs as further reason to hunt his white whale and exact revenge on the unknown.
Although Ahab unabashedly exploits his crew's belief in fate, he also gives their lives purpose. One of the first things we learn about Ishmael is that he is going to sea as a sort of self-annihilation, as an alternative to “throw[ing] himself upon the sword” (Melville 14). Chapter 112, “The Blacksmith,” explores the notion of suicidal men who go to sea: “Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this … therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men … does the all-contributed and all receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures” (Melville 387). Ahab's exploitation of fatalism can be forgiven when one learns that he has given purpose to the lives of men who were already prepared to lie down and die. Like Ishmael, these men found themselves broken by the torment of life on land, and they fled to the sea for action and adventure, no matter the consequences. It just so happens that by boarding the Pequod, these men become a consequence of Ahab's monomaniacal crusade.
His crew recognizes Ahab as a force that will not be reckoned with; obedience is crucial to maintaining an on-board discipline and chain of command. On the Pequod, Ahab is tyrant, king, god, and the men in the crew are his loyal subjects. Even Stubb considers it a privilege to be kicked in the rear-end by Ahab. Ishmael remarks how odd it is that the motley crew remains loyal to Ahab despite his “madness”:
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the had of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals … Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him in his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire – by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his … (Melville 156-157).
The sum of these miscreants' convictions is precisely why Ahab seeks justice against God. Their suffering is his suffering, and, by slaying the white whale, he expects to offer them vindication for their individual struggles. To the end, the loyal crew defiantly supports its captain in his crusade. Each man comes to accept Ahab's fate as his own, and, in appreciation of his captain's dignified stance against the unknowable, goes down with him in the fight. He, too, becomes legendary. Instead of giving up on the lives they were dealt, these men create for themselves nobler ends.
Just before Ahab's encounter with the whale, he repents, to Starbuck, the holiest on the ship, nonetheless. He questions free will and his own identity, and comes to understand the folly of his quest. He also knows that he is on a path that cannot be broken – his encounter with Moby Dick is both fated and sure to be fatal. It is at this point that Ahab possesses more understanding than ever before – he is destined to lose, and he knows it. Despite repenting, he cannot turn back, nor does his crew allow him to. Although they anticipate no less than a terrifying end, they help their captain reach their common destiny. Starbuck consoles Ahab when he laments leaving behind his wife and child, Daggoo and Tashtego let Ahab spy Moby Dick first, and the entire crew works furiously to keep the Pequod afloat after it is attacked by the whale. The final image of Tashtego relentlessly hammering the flag to the ship as it sinks signifies the crew's loyalty to their captain's purpose and, to a greater extent, the enduring spirit of humanity in the face of that which it cannot control.
Captain Ahab, a deep-thinking philosopher and man more tuned to nature than civilization, finds limitations in both God and in the white whale he hunts. He is angry at the omnipotent Creator because He built man with the capacity to learn, but not with the ability to understand God Himself or the great mystical underpinnings of the universe. He rejects Father Mapple's assertion that people should blindly accept their fate, as it has already been written by God and cannot be altered on earth. Having lived at sea for forty years, Ahab has come to regard only himself as the author of his destiny. He perceives the world, not through God, but through nature, and because the white whale is the only beast in the sea he cannot control, he compares it to the lack of control men have over their own lives when they blindly follow fate. Ahab's crusade against Moby Dick is a crusade against God Himself. Ahab and his crew of miscreants die in defiance of man's limited knowledge, declaring that, from this point forward, men will create their own destinies. Melville's Moby-Dick, then, becomes the holy doctrine of men who cannot accept religious determinism, and Ahab becomes a god of the godless and a hero to the disillusioned.
Works Cited
Bergstrom, Robert F. “The Topmost Grief: Rejection of Ahab's Faith.” Essays in Literature 2.2 (1975). The University of Nebraska. 171-180. Literary Reference Center. Ohio U. Lib., Athens, OH. 26 Jan. 2010.
Booth, Thornton Y. “Moby Dick: Standing Up to God.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17.1 (1962). University of California Press. 33-43. JSTOR. Ohio U. Lib., Athens, OH. 26 Jan. 2010.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Dover, 2003.
Woodson, Thomas. “Ahab's Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus.” ELH 33.3 (1966). The Johns Hopkins University Press. 351-369. JSTOR. Ohio U. Lib., Athens, OH. 4 Feb. 2010.
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