Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 187How it is seen, what it is seen as being and meaning, depend entirely on who is
seeing it. Three characters, in particular, are given the chance to explain what they
see at some length. One offers his explanation early on in the novel, even before the
voyage in quest of the white whale begins: Father Mapple, whose sermon delivered
to a congregation that includes Ishmael in the Whaleman’s Chapel – and forming
the substance of the ninth chapter – is a declaration of faith, trust in a fundamental
benevolence. It is a vision allowed a powerful imaginative apotheosis in a much later
chapter entitled “The Grand Armada.” Here, Ishmael and his fellow crewmen move
ever further inward into a school of whales: from the turbulent periphery, where a
“strangely gallied” group circle around in “a delirious throb” to an inscrutably serene
core of “nursing mothers” and their young. The experience discloses a hope, a
possibility of “that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
commotion:” the belief that there may, after all, be an “eternal mildness,” a still point
at the center of the turning world. Outside of these two moments, however, this is
not a vision in which much narrative time or imaginative energy is invested. The
visions that matter here, the explanations – or, rather, possible explanations – that
count, rehearse the fundamental division around which all Melville’s work circulates;
and they belong to the two main human figures in the tale, its hero and its teller,
Ahab and Ishmael.
For Ahab, Moby-Dick represents everything that represses and denies. Believing
only in a fundamental malevolence, he feels toward the white whale something of
“the general rage and hate felt by the whole race from Adam down.” Having lost his
leg in a previous encounter with his enemy, he also desires vengeance, not just on the
“dumb brute” that injured him but on the conditions that created that brute, which
for him that brute symbolizes – the human circumstances that would frustrate him,
deny him his ambitions and desires. Ahab is a complex figure. A tragic hero, carrying
the marks of his mortality, the human limitation he would deny – a wooden leg, a
scar running down his face and into his clothing that resembles the “perpendicular
seam” made in a tree trunk struck by lightning – he is also a type of the artist, or any
visionary intent on the essence of things. “All visible objects, man, are but as
pasteboard masks,” he declares. “If a man will strike, strike through the mask! How
can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white
whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Ahab is, in fact, as much embarked on a sym-
bolic project as his creator is, struggling to break through the surface, the seeming to
what may lie beneath. An artist, he is also an American: a rebel like Hester Prynne, an
enormous egotist like Ralph Waldo Emerson in the sense that he sees the universe as
an externalization of his soul, and an imperialist whose belief in his own Manifest
Destiny compels him to use all other men like tools and claim dominion over nature.
A rich network of allusion and image establishes the several related facets of Ahab’s
character. He is a “monomaniac,” marked by a “fatal pride,” yet he also has a “cruci-
fixion in his face.” His “fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,” he insists, just like the
railway then marking out the domination of American nature by American culture.
But, in his inaccessibility, “he lived in the world” but “was still alien to it,” Ishmael
observes, “as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri.” His ship sets sail onGGray_c02.indd 187ray_c 02 .indd 187 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM