Why Read Moby-Dick Read Free Page A

Melville decided he would do exactly the opposite of what Owen Chase and the other crew members of the Essex had done. He would desert the ship that had been his home for the last nineteen months and live among the so-called cannibals.
    Nine years later he published Moby-Dick, a novel that begins with the protagonist, Ishmael, finding himself, to his initial horror, sharing a bed with a tattooed cannibal named Queequeg. In a winningly comic distillation of the experience that had forever changed Melville’s life in the Marquesas, Ishmael comes to the realization that artificial distinctions between civilization and savagery are beside the point. “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” This startling insight was revolutionary in 1851 and is still wickedly fresh to us today, more than 150 years later, as globalization makes encounters with foreign cultures an almost daily occurrence.
    But Melville was not able to laugh away the lessons of the Essex . Despite its comic beginning, Moby-Dick quickly moves into darker and more harrowing metaphysical territory, and it is the moral isolation of the Essex crew members, afloat upon the wide and immense sea in their tiny whaleboats, that underlies the fated voyage of the Pequod . In the chapter “The Lee Shore,” Ishmael speaks of one Bulkington, a sailor for whom the land has proved “scorching to his feet” and who heads out once again after just completing a previous whaling voyage. It is only amid the terrifying vastness of the sea that man can confront the ultimate truths of his existence: “[A]ll deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea. . . . [I]n landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God. . . . Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?” For Melville, and for any thinking human being, this is more than a rhetorical question.

3
    Desperado Philosophy
    H e tells us to call him Ishmael, but who is the narrator of
    Moby-Dick ? For one thing, he has known depression, “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” But he is also a person of genuine enthusiasms. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, he is wonderfully engaging, a vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest to murder the blues by shipping out on a whaleship.
    Ishmael is no tourist. As a common seaman, he gets paid for his adventures. “[ B ] eing paid, ” he rhapsodizes, “what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”
    Getting paid is certainly a bonus, but Ishmael isn’t doing this for the money. He’s in pursuit of an almost Platonic ideal, what he calls “the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.” “Such a portentous and mysterious monster,” he continues, “roused all my curiosity.” But he’s also looking for the clarifying jolt that comes with doing something dangerous. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” he tells us, “and land on barbarous coasts.” The best way to satisfy this “everlasting itch for things remote,” he decides, is to head for Nantucket, the birthplace of American whaling. “[T]here was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island,” he says, “which amazingly pleased me.”
    Not even a sobering visit to the Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford, where he studies the marble tablets memorializing those lost at sea, is enough to make him rethink