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

life of nature.
    The greater emphasis on the individual mind found diverse literary expression up to Melville’s time, from the Byronic hero to the protagonists of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both published in 1847). In America, Charles Brockton Brown and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed psychological derangement and its effects, and by the time Melville met Hawthorne the older man had already written much about how a will to dominate can distort the personality and damage others. Though Ahab’s imperial mind has little interest in money, he is crazily bent on the exercise of power—he manipulates men with great skill and flamboyance as though they were “mechanical,” as he says of Stubb, the second mate, and he later extends the term to the general crew.
    Ahab is, finally, an “isolato” of the kind we find elsewhere in Melville and in Hawthorne as well: the man who cuts himself off from his fellows out of an egotistical illusion of superiority often combined with an obsession with revenge. Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter (1850) is like Ahab in his desire for retribution, an obsession in both figures that erodes their humanity as they become morally destructive to themselves and to others. But Ahab has a grandeur that protects him from Chillingworth’s unworthiness, a largeness of character born of the vast scale of his purpose combined with his intermittent self-knowledge. At times Ahab knows what he has done to himself, but the awareness is rapidly overridden by the hatred that drives his all-powerful will, a will that in the world of the Pequod nothing can stop except his death.
    Ahab is at the same time a grand figure of Romantic individualism and an example of individualism gone terribly wrong; he sums up what is both noble and lethal in the cult of the great man. At the climax of his speech to the corpusants, the rare but real glowing lights that can form at the ends of the spars, Ahab declares that “a personality stands here”; he has in mind an unfettered assertion of the self in its worldly practice, and one may remember that Walt Whitman later said repeatedly that Leaves of Grass was the expression of an American personality during its time in the nineteenth century. In letters, one can watch such assertions work themselves out for ill or good; in life, the issue is at what point the unfettered self must be checked for the common good. It is understandable that at the height of twentieth-century totalitarianism, some readers saw Ahab as a fascist type, but that is a limited view. He is a figure complex enough always to be characteristic of tendencies in any social and political form.
    Starbuck and Pip are the only ones who try to dissuade Ahab, one the second in command, the other at the bottom of the ship’s roster. Starbuck is a good man who goes about his business in a levelheaded way, and who shows his decency as he tries to stop Flask from lancing a sick whale just to cause pain: “There’s no need of that!” (p. 418). When Ahab announces his purpose, Starbuck tells him that he has signed on to hunt whales, not his captain’s vengeance. Ahab tries to bribe him, but then takes the measure of his three mates and sees that in the face of the crew’s enthusiasm they can be controlled if not enlisted.
    Though Starbuck lives by Christian values, he even thinks of killing Ahab, but can’t bring himself to violence against a man he otherwise reveres; and before the last day of the chase he makes a final appeal: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” (p. 649). But these are thoughts and comments, and he cannot take effective action against a man who renders opposition harmless through personal force and the orchestration of emotional rituals.
    A more serious threat to Ahab’s aim is “the little negro Pippin” who was saved “by the merest chance” after he jumped out of a whaleboat in fright and sinking deep “saw