Student Writing Handbook Fifth+Edition

Literary Analyses / 243

constant awareness of foreboding, a repetition of premonitions, the divinity but at the same

time the terror of whiteness: the bleached ship Albatross reminiscent of the becalmed, scorch-

ing, death-filled trip of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the symbolic third day of the

chase, the third time down for the whale, the third time out for Fate’s lieutenant. Fate is interwo-

ven through the entire novel. All of this evidence of fate, this quest for answers, however, is a

major part of life. Oedipus sought answers; but he knew he could not get them all, was warned

that he should not. Santiago pushed too far and was almost unable to return to society. So

Ahab pushed too far. Because Ahab pushed too far does not mean, though, that Melville would

prefer the stagnation of the lee shore. The full life comes only with that spark of divinity which

causes man to search.

Carrying the motif to its final major part, Melville, in “The Gilder,” shows the reader the real

magnitude of this symbolic mat:

But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by

storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we

do not advance through fixed gradations, and at last one pause.... Our souls are like

orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies

in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

The original woven mat of “The Mat-Maker” has, then, emerged finally as a symbol of man’s

life on the one hand and the pattern of all life on the other, both made up of storms and calms,

of troubles and solutions, of evil and goodness. Melville would not have his reader forget that

there is both evil and goodness, and he thus emphasizes that there is a calm for every storm.

Shakespeare, in fact, in All’s Well That Ends Well (Act IV, Scene 3) emphasizes that same idea:

“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”