188 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865Christmas Day, initiating the first in a series of references to the story of Christ. Yet
the harpoon with which he wishes, finally, to master Moby-Dick he baptizes in the
name of the Devil. “A grand ungodly, god-like man,” Ahab projects his overpowering
belief in himself, his will to power, on to Moby-Dick, seeing in the great white whale
all that prevents a man from becoming a god. And the key to Melville’s portrait of
him is its dualism: it is as if the author were summoning up his, and possibly our,
dark twin.
“Is it by its indefiniteness,” Ishmael asks of “the whiteness of the whale,” “it shadows
forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe ... ?” It is Ishmael who
describes white as “a colorless all-color.” It is Ishmael, too, expanding on this, who
points out that “all other earthly hues” are “but subtle deceits, not actually inherent
in substances, but only laid on from without”; produced, every one of them, by “the
great principle of light,” which “for ever remains white or colorless in itself,” they are
a matter merely of surface, seeming. It is Ishmael, finally, who declares that the whale
“has no face” and is characterized by “his pyramidical silence.” In short, for the
narrator of Moby-Dick, the great white whale unveils the probability that the world is
nothing but surface stratified on surface – that what is disclosed when we peer
intently at our circumstances is neither benevolence nor malevolence but something
as appallingly vacant as it is vast, a fundamental indifference. That, though, is not all
there is to Ishmael. In the course of the story, he also undergoes a sentimental
education. Beginning with a misanthropy so thoroughgoing and dryly ironic that he
even mocks his misanthropic behavior (sometimes, he confesses, “it requires a strong
moral principle to prevent me from ... methodically knocking people’s hats off ”), he
ends by accepting and embracing his kinship with unaccommodated man, the
human folly and weakness he sees all around him. Specifically, he embraces Queequeg,
a Polynesian harpooneer, whom initially he finds, even more than most of humanity,
repellent. Before embarking on the Pecquod, he and Queequeg share a bed, out of
necessity, in a crowded inn, “a cosy, loving pair”; they share companionship and each
other’s religions – with Queequeg joining Ishmael in attending Father Mapple’s
sermon, and Ishmael participating in Queequeg’s ceremonies with his small idol
Yojo. Then, on board ship, with a monkey-ripe tied between them, Ishmael comes to
realize that, as he puts it, “my own individuality was now merged in a joint-stock
company of two.” It is this, Ishmael’s return to a specifically human sphere – expressed,
in a characteristically American way, in the bonding of two people of the same sex
but from different races – that enables him, quite literally, to survive. When all other
crew members of the Pecquod are lost, and the ship itself sunk, after three days of
struggle with Moby-Dick; when Ahab is destroyed by becoming one with that which
he would destroy, tied by his own ropes to the great white whale; then, Ishmael floats
free in what is, in effect, a reproduction of Queequeg’s body – a coffin Queequeg has
made, and on to which he has copied “the twisting tattooing” on his own skin. It is
survival, not triumph. “Another orphan” of the world, an existential outcast like all
humanity, Ishmael lives on because he has resigned himself to the limitations of the
sensible, the everyday, the ordinary: to all that is identified, for good and ill, with the
land. The difference between his own quietly ironic idiom and the romantic rhetoricGGray_c02.indd 188ray_c 02 .indd 188 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM