Moby-Dick 761Yet in crafting Moby-Dick, Melville doesn’t
content himself with easy and predictable racial
binaries. As already evidenced in the humorous and
humane friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg,
racial whiteness is not always clearly good, and non-
white ethnicity is not always clearly evil or inferior.
In particular, blackness and whiteness become fluid
and often paradoxical tropes for psychological,
metaphysical, and religious realities of enormous
complexity. Blackness appears early in the novel
as a theological trope for sin and damnation; Ish-
mael comically wanders into an African-American
church where a preacher discourses on the “black-
ness of darkness” (a reference to the darkness of
damnation in Matthew 8:12). Yet blackness serves
also as a metaphorical curative for Ahab’s mono-
maniacal hatred of Moby Dick. Pip, the disenfran-
chised young black cabin-boy on Pequod, goes crazy
when abandoned in the ocean during a whale hunt,
and his very insanity and vulnerability, which Ahab
calls a “holiness,” endear the boy to Ahab. When Pip
catches Ahab by the hand shortly before Ahab’s final
confrontation with Moby Dick, Ahab proclaims
“There is that in thee . . . which I feel too curing to
my malady” (chapter 129).
Whiteness itself is also an unstable and complex
category in the novel. While whiteness often signi-
fies socioeconomic power, privilege, and advantage,
it also signifies psychological horror, nihilism, and
even atheism. In chapter 42, the “Whiteness of the
Whale,” Ishmael initially affirms the conventional
significances that his era associated with whiteness
(e.g., racial superiority, feminine purity, kingly royalty,
the power of God); yet he proceeds to undercut such
affirmations by turning the significance of whiteness
completely on its head in his attempt to explain why
Moby Dick’s whiteness terrifies and appalls him.
Whiteness, to Ishmael in certain moods, represents
“by its indefiniteness . . . the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from
behind with the thought of annihilation” (chapter
42). Ishmael goes on to call it the “all-color of athe-
ism,” and, asserting that whiteness is “the visible
absence of color” and that all color is merely an optic
effect produced by light in the human eye, he shud-
ders to think that reality is actually a blank white by
which “the palsied universe lies before us a leper.”
In summary, Melville’s use of race in Moby-Dick
is masterfully complex, ranging from commentary
upon societal injustices to plumbing the depths of
the human soul.
Aaron UrbanczykreliGion in Moby-Dick
The religious dimension of Moby-Dick should be
obvious to even the casual reader. Many characters
have biblical names; the novel is populated with
references to Christian and non-Christian religions;
and even whales themselves, particularly Moby
Dick, are frequently described using religious imag-
ery. This religious context gives Ishmael’s narrative
of Ahab’s quest for vengeance an epic and cosmic
dimension. Ishmael’s search for meaning and truth
becomes theological (a search for God and ultimate
truths), and Ahab’s obsessive hatred for Moby Dick
becomes akin to blasphemous impiety (a perverse
rejection of the divine order).
In naming his characters, Melville drew from
the religious richness of the Bible. Ishmael is named
after the spurned son of Abraham and Hagar. This
allusion gives Ishmael’s character a rich depth; he is
the universal seeker and survivor who like his bibli-
cal namesake is both excluded from God’s covenant
(through Abraham) and sustained by God in the
wilderness of exile. On the other hand, Melville’s
use of biblical allusion places Ahab in the tradition
of defiant, blasphemous, and idolatrous authority
figures (the kings Ahab and Jeroboam) who were
prophetically warned by God to amend their wicked
ways. Captain Ahab’s namesake is King Ahab, a
wicked and idolatrous Hebrew king; and Elijah,
the crazed prophet who utters cryptic warnings to
Ishmael and Queequeg before they board Pequod,
is named after the famous Hebrew prophet who
rebuked King Ahab for his idolatry.
Melville also makes use of sacred worship space
and preaching in the novel to lend its tragic action
a religious dimension. In chapter 2, Ishmael (still
in New Bedford) accidentally stumbles into an
African-American church where “a black Angel of
Doom was beating a book in a pulpit” and preach-
ing “about the blackness of darkness.” Ishmael visits
a second worship space, the famous “Whaleman’s
Chapel” in New Bedford, where he hears Father