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

nobility.
    Without hereditary claim, and only the formalities of shipboard as a substitute for court ceremonies, Ahab had to be constructed from the ground up as a man worthy of great regard. In “The Ship” there is a paragraph in which Ishmael lists the qualities necessary to produce “a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” (p. 106), and through the course of the book Melville does this by a series of references and actions that progressively make him much greater than a normal man. The first move is again to use an Old Testament name.
    The biblical Ahab Melville had in mind was a powerful though evil king denounced, in both the Bible and the novel, by the prophet Elijah, who foretells his violent end. The warnings build as Ishmael is unable to learn much about him, and when Peleg says he “has his humanities” one wonders why something so apparently obvious needs to be said. Shadowy figures go aboard the Pequod and remain long in hiding, and other signs raise anxiety toward Ahab’s first appearance, where the imagery idealizes him in both his suffering and his stature.
    The metaphors make him a man who, though burned at the stake, was only hardened by it, who took a lightning strike and showed only a scar like a great blasted tree, and who has the solidity of the famous Renaissance bronze Perseus, the son of Zeus whose supernatural feats included the killing of the Gorgon Medusa, the sight of whom turned men to stone (p. 158). Ahab is not of our world, far above us in suffering, survival, and force. His presence continues to grow with the strategies of his leadership, and in two of the book’s most remarkable chapters, the narrator works to make us as sympathetic as possible toward Ahab’s purpose. “Moby Dick” (chap. XLI) shows that his mad obsession is in intention generous toward all mankind, and “The Whiteness of the Whale” (chap. XLII) universalizes the awe and wonder at the whale’s beauty and the terror of its power and hue, a process begun in the Extracts that precede the narrative.
    All this contributes to the status of the novel’s dark protagonist, a great man made dangerous by his crazed reaction to a dreadful accident. As sea captain, he is restrained only by the need to maintain the crew’s obedience, and except for a few they join his hunt because of his gift for mesmerizing ceremony. Only the ship’s officers hold back: He will insult Starbuck and Stubb, the first and second mates, but when he must he’ll give way just enough to blunt opposition, and this is not agreement but a means to his end.
    In creating Ahab, Melville was responding to one of the great issues of the time: the role of the individual in a culture that was increasingly democratic—that decentralized the old nodes of power and was at the time becoming more and more industrialized—that concentrated economic and often political power in new hands. Like the English social commentator Thomas Carlyle, whose work he knew, Melville was acutely aware of the cost involved in the new economy. In Redburn , he had vividly described the horrors of a Liverpool slum, and in the paired sketches “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” he bitterly contrasted the comforts of luxury and the dehumanizing demands of the early factory system.
    Involved in these cultural shifts was a stronger emphasis on the powerful person as the chief agent of historical change, and social commentators argued urgently for moral leadership on the part of those who could bring influence to bear. In England, Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1841) was a major call for such dedication. In America, Emerson and Thoreau stressed the proper cultivation of the self in the context of a democratic scene. Both saw a society in which too many defined the opportunities of individualism as money and position, and they called for personal growth informed by an openness to spiritual values working through the