Why Read Moby-Dick Read Free Page B

his decision to ship out on a Nantucket vessel. “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?”
    A reckless, rapturous sense of his soul’s imperishability overtakes Ishmael. “Methinks my body is but the lees [the sediment left in wine] of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.” Let God, fate, or what have you do as it sees fit. In the end, Ishmael will prevail. “And therefore three cheers for Nantucket,” he exults, “and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”
    Later in the book, after he is almost killed when his whaleboat is smacked by a whale before being swamped in a squall, Ishmael decides it might be a good idea, after all, to write his will. And it is here, in chapter 49, “The Hyena,” that he hits upon the approach to life that will act as the emotional and philosophical center of the novel. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,” he tells us, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”
    Ishmael describes this approach to life as a “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.” In the chapters to come, Ahab will drag him (and all of us) into the howling depths of the human psyche. In the beginning, however, before Ahab takes hold, we are in the presence of a soul so buoyant, so mischievous, so wise, and so much fun that even after the worst happens at the end of the novel, we can take consolation in knowing that at least Ishmael has found a way to survive. Like Melville, who is one of our country’s greatest literary survivors, Ishmael is still left to tell the tale, and we had better listen to every word.

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    Nantucket
    W hen Melville wrote Moby-Dick, New Bedford, not
    Nantucket, was the most important whaling port in America. But Ishmael is not interested in the biggest whaling port; he wants to go to the first, to the “great original,” the sandy island almost thirty miles out to sea where it all began.
    Melville drew upon his own personal experiences in his novels, but he was also a great pillager of other writers’ prose. During the composition of Moby-Dick he acquired a virtual library of whaling-related books, and passages from these works inevitably made their way into his novel. The writing process for Melville was as much about responding to and incorporating the works of others as it was about relying on his own experiences. And since Melville seems never to have visited Nantucket before writing Moby-Dick, he was free to create an imagined rather than an actual island, an animated, often antic state of mind that exemplified America’s grasping push for more. And since Nantucket in 1850 was already past its prime, there is a nostalgic quality to his five-paragraph evocation of the island in chapter 14. Instead of writing history, Melville is forging an American mythology.
    Nantucket, Ishmael proclaims, is “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” He then proceeds to spin off joke after joke about how sandy and sterile the island is. There are so few trees on Nantucket that islanders carry around scraps of wood “like bits of the true cross in Rome.” They plant toadstools to provide themselves with some shade. In order to wade through all the sand, they wear the gritty equivalent of snowshoes. The sea is so omnipresent “that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering.”
    After devoting the two subsequent paragraphs to a distillation of the island’s history, taking us from the oral traditions of the first Native inhabitants through to the