Serious Melville
Too often the age-old idea of duality limits a nuanced understanding of life. The proverbial battle between good and evil, light and dark, suggests that one wins out by the end. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick creates an narrative arena in which these forces refract through one another, morphing into powerfully ambiguous and irresolvable caveats of existence. Moby Dick, while unquestionably the main driver of the narrative, serves as both the object of, and pretext to, the human conflict indelibly staged between Ahab and Starbuck. The former remains madly bent on extricating the madness and darkness from the soul (Moby Dick the manifestation of this darkness) while the latter acts as a withering beacon that brings light and reason to the soul, but ultimately loses out. The quandary that envelopes them soon becomes a test of will, of fighting against the natural world which determines one’s condition, or acquiescing to the terrible truth of existence. Ultimately, Melville underscores how Ahab’s quest to kill Moby Dick becomes secondary to his conflict with Starbuck, which proves a far more ubiquitous struggle — the moral and philosophical struggle festering in the soul.
Ishmael’s narration before and during “The Quarter-Deck” chapter sheds light on Starbuck’s sensitivities and Ahab’s rhetorical powers. In “Knights and Squires” the reader learns that Starbuck, “cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man”(Melville 126). His sensibilities appear practical up until a point, that point being an incensed man like Ahab. Starbuck holds normal courages in good strength, yet the uncanny or the enigmatic seem to accost his capabilities. On the quarter-deck, we see Starbuck try to speak truth to such power when he retorts “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance”(177). In holding his viewpoint so frankly he sounds like the kind of leader anyone would follow, one who takes transparent and practical risks. Yet Ahab’s response to this makes Starbuck seem like a wet towel on the heat of the moment and the grand excitement that the chase necessitates. As Ahab soliloquizes,
some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If 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. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.
His speech serves to, as Starbuck later reflects, make “Ahabs” of the whole crew, and only by generalizing, and pinning down the metaphor inherent in the hunt, connecting it to some of the most shared sentiments of human experience, does he crush Starbuck’s pragmatic logic. The conflict temporarily resolves itself with Starbuck casting his eyes down, and Ahab ritualizing and toasting to the hunt. At one point though the narration reads the scene on the ship, as the sails fill out and the winds blow on (179) and these natural occurences, surrounding and surrounded by the dual of wills between Ahab and Starbuck speak to the immemorial conflict just getting underway between them.
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These natural occurences begin coming into broader descriptions during later chapters, in particular “The Spirit Spout” when the narrative begins to take an otherwordly tone. Ishmael begins by acknowledging the general sentiment of the crew when hearing Fedallah descry the jet, as he explains, “Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure… And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it”(254–255) The amazement of the spout in the distance, tempting them forward, stupefies Ishmael and the crew. He imbues this awe into the overall tone of this chapter. The wonder transcends from Ishmael to the reader, and just as Ahab made his crew assume his need for vengeance, so too does the narration make the reader feel obligated, by dint of the lyrical nature of the prose, to encounter the unknown. One such instance reads, “And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred”(255). Their entire surroundings, the sea and its depths, now start to become the realm in which they might combat the looming darkness. The diction of the previous passage (black sea, mundane soul, anguish, suffering) acknowledges the connection between the natural world and the sublimated hunt at play — all of the premonitional diction of course points toward Moby Dick and the inevitable doom, but by going towards him the crew actively battles the dark and bizarre realms that roost in themselves and begins reflect back on them through the surroundings. All the while Starbuck seems like the only character bent on running from this battle, or at least the only one who understands its futility, and almost everything around him points to his hopelessness, as when the narration explains,
going down into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, Starbuck saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair… Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.
Even asleep, Ahab’s energy and being remains focused on the path toward the unknown and the danger that awaits them. To Starbuck this image rightly troubles him, how could it not? It is as if Ahab were Starbuck’s own Moby Dick, or his conflict with Ahab were the negative image of Ahab’s conflict with the whale — Ahab representing that which Starbuck wishes did not exist, mainly, the source of reckless abandon with which one may desire to defeat death.
A notable shift occurs in the conflict between Starbuck and Ahab during “The Candles” and “The Musket” chapters which effectively sheds light on the futile nature of both their goals. During the typhoon, Starbuck notes, “Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward — I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning”(548). With the potential outcomes wholly apparent Starbuck almost resigns himself to his fate or to the grand display of nature that he can’t stop from rolling over them. Oppositely, the situation only appears to accelerate Ahab’s warpath, as the narration notes right after Starbuck’s observations that, “At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead. ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Old Thunder!’”(548). Almost comically Ahab appears out of nowhere to demean and manhandle Starbuck’s reason. Ahab answers Starbuck’s question twofold, referring to the thunder over them and he himself, which only furthers his position and his fate as inevitable, because he allies himself with the very thing that remains capable of destroying him. The environment surrounding Ahab, Starbuck, and the crew now pushes them closer and closer to the brink of destruction and mirrors the turmoil within Starbuck’s person. The indecisive image of the black windward and light leeward finds manifestation in “the Musket” chapter when we read, “Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself”(558). Plunging deeper into the ambiguity of his situation Starbuck becomes more fraught with his decision making. Whereas early on he used his courage in “mortally practical occasions”(125) he finds that, in a somewhat roundabout way, he now calls on his courage to kill the mad courage in Ahab, a courage so reckless that Starbuck knows it imperils the whole crew, as he acknowledges, “I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom, — that’s fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that accursed fish”(558). At this point in the novel the reader would be dull to disregard how much Moby Dick has become the symbol for the shadow of all the men aboard the Pequod, not the least Starbuck. Though the reader might question Starbuck’s obstinancy, for the Pequod hase seemingly gone past the point of no return, and if he so readily accepts death as a by-product of whaling, why can’t he accept Ahab’s vengeful motives? He reflects that, “Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid! — But is there no other way?”(599) Starbuck resents the motives in Ahab because to him they appear disingenuous, which is both true and not, for Ahab will only find peace through killing the whale, just as Starbuck will only find peace through killing Ahab, which he ultimately can not do. The blatant irony here remains that Starbuck, who can not wrestle the angel (560) within him, so against certain death (all death is certain), will not employ death to stave it off.
The indescribable pathos exeperienced between Ahab and Starbuck in “The Symphony” defies all other resolutions because it lacks a tangible catharsis. One begins to think that they were fighting to see who could lose better or more authentically. Starbuck, ready to die a natural whaler’s death, or Ahab, who has lasted so long that he must now seek it out and see if he can’t beat it. Again Melville lays the reader into the moment with a lyrical prose that melts away all previous conflict and disagreement between the two. The narration notes how “Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around”(590). The gravity of the prose here turns their experience into our experience, as any good writing will, and for once in the book Moby Dick disappears, as time stops for these two diametrically opposed characters to hold one another in a human view. They cease to impose upon one another. These sentiments only grow stronger as Ahab laments,
How the richer or better is Ahab now?… Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?…But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise (591)
Here, by likening himself to Adam, he becomes a sourcepoint and endpoint for all experience, and Melville knows that imbibing all of these hugely profound feelings and emotions into him allows for humankind, even if only breifly, to overshadow the terror and void of the natural world that Moby Dick represents. And later still, to put the human above all else that matters, Ahab continues, “Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God”(591). One begins to wonder if these emotions so totally charge these opinions that they turn into fact, simply because both men know them to be true, and in the face of Moby Dick, one must reaffirm them if they wish to salvage any semblance of humanity. The whole novel justly works toward precipating these anguished ponderings of Ahab, “what… remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab?”(592) The self-reflection here can almost serve as the resolution of the entire novel. It does not matter that he dies while spearing Moby Dick because he maintained an incredible moment of honesty — one can almost see the innocence, the child in Ahab, afraid, angry, and ashamed with himself for all that he has done against his person and his peers. Ahab concludes, “Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky… toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness…Starbuck!” But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away” (592). That question at the start of the passage serves as acknowledgment of the anguish we all might feel in accepting that our predicament has no solution. Ahab expresses and knows this, and Starbuck, having stolen away signifies as much — we give meaning to the world, and without us, we wonder, will meaning remain? Such imponderables further clarify the fraught relationship between Ahab and Starbuck and put neither at fault for their loaded, polar obstinacies.
Ahab and Starbuck’s characters serve an important purpose in turning their conflict into a somewhat common struggle, since both of them desire freedom from supernatural authority. Their struggle acknowledges the certain timelessness inherent in the powers that may in some cases determine our lives. In “The Fossil Whale” Ishmael reflects, “I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over”(498) The symbol of the whale, not just Moby Dick, holds a certain gravity over Ishmael and all the other characters. Their profesion unapologetically peels away a level of reality and makes a mockery of the human struggle. Yet this unsourced existence of the terrors of the whale informs the duality and conflicts in man and makes them venerable in their own right. The unavoidable facts of existence that Ahab and Starbuck come up against unsurprisingly produce in them unparalleled madness, impotence, and despair. And, as Ishmael expresses, these unalterable natural laws must exist beyond the short time allotted to us. Ultimately, we have no way of giving meaning to the oblivion from which we stem without racing toward it. To Starbuck, such a plan disregards the accesible, beautiful truths of living, and for Ahab, he simply needs to know if there truly is naught beyond.
