Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that allows the men to see it: The whalers are in the business of killing as many of these creatures as possible, and the cetacean mothers-milk will be red with blood.
    Among the men these sexual issues are more guarded. It is of course a world without women; marriage and children are mentioned but never brought to life. Ahab has left his wife and child behind as almost all men did, but he has also done so emotionally, and while Peleg tells Ishmael that “Ahab has his humanities!” (p. 113) it is not a good sign that this needs to be said. Ahab’s initial isolation in his cabin is attributed to a serious wound in the groin inflicted by his whalebone leg, a sexual injury suggestive of what he has done to his own humanity. Less grimly, Queequeg compares the symbolism of Ahab’s gold doubloon, nailed to the mast, to “something in the vicinity of his thigh,” and Ishmael remarks, “I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer” (p. 503). These are coded references to energies that are more happily opened up at the Spouter Inn, where Ishmael and Queequeg become friends.
    These two bear the book’s principal weight of affection, the love that best binds mankind together. In a later chapter they are on the two ends of a “monkey-rope,” Ishmael protecting his friend who is on the carcass of a whale with sharks attacking from below (chap. LXXII), and at the end of the book it is with Queequeg’s coffin that Ishmael saves himself. There are other characters who briefly show gentle and even affectionate recognition: Both Starbuck and Pip reach out to Ahab, who must rein in his momentary sympathies if he is not to be swayed from his purpose.
    The matrimonial imagery of the Spouter Inn scenes is explicit, as Queequeg the first night holds Ishmael in “his bridegroom clasp,” but Ishmael finds this “a comic predicament” that he wishes to escape. The two become fast friends, and after talking in bed, “in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy loving pair” (p. 82). Queequeg tells the story of his life, and then “embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping” (p. 87). There has been controversy about this imagery, some seeing a movement toward romantic love. But one must be very careful before pushing Melville’s language into special meanings. More often than not such narrow readings do violence to Melville’s imaginative world, reducing rather than illuminating the resonance of the text. While it is true that the only fully happy ship the Pequod meets is called The Bachelor , one remembers that the permanent party on that ship’s deck includes the native girls who have run off with the sailors.

Ahab
    While Ishmael and Queequeg are the repositories of fellow-feeling, Ahab has almost entirely killed that in himself, and on the few brief occasions when his cold resolve is softened by those “humanities” that Peleg had mentioned to Ishmael, he pushes that emotion away lest it keep him from his aim. Melville intended to make Ahab a great man, and gave him just enough sanity to make us realize how great its loss had been.
    Shakespeare was an inspiration to Melville in various ways, and surely so in imagining Ahab as a tragic figure in the classic sense—a great man brought down by his faults. In one sense Melville faced a task more difficult than for the Renaissance dramatists, for whom the status of a king or queen brought with it the culture’s deference toward that still powerful office, a position at the head of humanity with overtones of divine empowerment. If the protagonist was not a king, he was likely to be in line for it, the prince of possibility. Melville was acutely aware that modernity and democracy denied him that initial advantage, and it was only the beginning of an answer to make Ahab a sea captain, the ruler of his small world, which gave him station but not