The narrating mind (called Ishmael at first) hurtles outward, gorging itself with whale lore and with the private memories of men who barely speak. Sometimes this narrative voice breaks out into choral effusion or splinters into the competitive chatter of the sailors. Yet the compositional principle of Moby-Dick is more than whim; it is as if Melville creates Ishmael in the image of his earlier versions of himself and then invites us to share the excitement of his self-destruction.

Moby-Dick is in this sense a lethal book. Hostile to all conventions, it reveals the suffocating airlessness of Ishmael’s initial consciousness, which comes to know itself as little more than an anthology of received opinions. Staring at the “boggy, soggy” picture, Ishmael concludes that “the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons.” He is at first a prig and a prude, offended by Queequeg’s habit of washing his chest and leaving his face unscrubbed, not to mention the savage’s genuflections before his little wooden idol, Yojo, which strikes Ishmael as “the color of a three days’ old Congo baby.” But Ishmael’s saving charm is his capacity for humor at his own expense. He grows amused by his own absurdities, and by the time he sails aboard the Pequod in the protective company of his now-beloved Queequeg, he has eliminated almost all his inherited conceptions—religious, social, political, even linguistic—from the categories of the sacred and the prudent and has moved them into the category of the arbitrary. Everything becomes unmoored, vulnerable, dispensable.

This process of divestiture is represented in an extraordinary chapter titled “The Counterpane,” in which Melville reviews what in effect was the construction of Ishmael’s self. In the bed they share in the Spouter Inn, Queequeg’s tatooed arm lies across the quilted counterpane that covers Ishmael’s chest, and in the first waking moments, when the line between consciousness and unconsciousness remains indeterminate, Ishmael feels himself dissolve into the flesh and fabric that are touching him. He cannot distinguish between Queequeg’s arm and the quilt, or even between his own body and the coverings that press upon it. Through this liberating confusion he relives a childhood experience (whether dream or reality he cannot say) in which he had waked from an enforced sleep that had been his punishment for trying to climb up the chimney. Dimly making out in the darkness his hand hanging off the bed, he had not known it as his own; it seemed an alien object clasped in the hand of some threatening phantom, and he had not dared try to move it to see if it were free to be withdrawn. He feared breaking the uncertainty as much as submitting to it, and under the spell of fright and fascination, he transformed his stepmother’s anger into guilt. This was the moment, he seems now to realize, in which he discovered the proscribed otherness of his body and of the world it craved.

Having relived this discovery, it is through the uninvited intimacy with Queequeg that Ishmael begins to unlearn his guilt. The reversal goes quickly, and he becomes both terrified and exhilarated by his new freedom. In a sexually redolent phrase, Melville has him remark “how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them,” and from that moment on, Ishmael achieves a certain distance from the Pequod’s hell-bent quest. The central theme of Moby-Dick begins to emerge in this implicit contrast between the transfigured Ishmael, whose consciousness has been diffused into a promiscuous taste for all experience, and the wracked captain of “fiery eyes” who refuses all distraction from his crusade. As the book moves on, Ishmael can hardly be located, while Ahab stands immovable, his pegleg anchored in his “stand-point”—the auger hole bored into the deck to keep him steady in a gale. “There was…a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of [Ahab’s] glance,” while Ishmael’s eyes are dreamy and roving. He frees himself from fear and anger and the appetite for retribution that they foster (“No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world”), while Ahab cannot be deterred from conquest and possession and revenge—not by Pip or Starbuck or even by the pleas of the captain of the Rachel, who begs for help in searching for his son lost at sea.

It is through the encounter between these two principles—the widening embrace of Ishmael and the “monomania” of Ahab—that Moby-Dick takes form. Yet the book never becomes merely a contest between them, because Melville himself incorporates both, and he feels their claims with equal fervor. The expansion and unstiffening of Ishmael’s mind are more and more manifest in Melville’s own ecstatic wordplay, in his generic mischievousness and irreverent associations: the peeled pelt of the whale’s penis (“grandissimus,” the sailors call it) is worn as a “surplice” by the crewman who minces the blubber; and the King of England, Melville reports with glee, unknowingly pomades his hair with sperm-whale oil “in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state.” Yet despite his love of such imaginative frolic, Melville is also enchanted by his inhuman and entirely humorless captain. As Milton does for Satan, he gives many of the best lines to grim Ahab, whose contempt for the trivial greed of the Pequod’s owners is immensely attractive, and whose rage, however fatal, is simply magnificent:

Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!…Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.

Ahab speaks with what Melville elsewhere calls a “Niagara” roar and is dignified even when he is at his most appalling. He is on a mission, Ishmael is on a cruise—and Moby-Dick is the record of their irresolvable confrontation.

 

Though this conflict played itself out independently within Melville’s mind, it also had specific corollaries in the actual scene of American politics. In one of its dimensions, Moby-Dick was a prophecy that the American experiment of separate political entities “federated along one keel” was imperiled, that the ship of state (a common metaphor in contemporary oratory) was foundering. When Melville began to work in earnest on Moby-Dick in early 1850, the Congressional debates over the provisions of what became known as the Compromise of 1850 were reverberating in all the papers and parlors of the land. In early March a dying John Calhoun sat in silence in the Senate chamber as his speech was read by a fellow Senator—a speech full of foreboding and predictions of catastrophe unless the antislavery agitation ceased. Daniel Webster’s reply (“I speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American”), in which he defended the compromise—including the provisions demanding manumission of fugitive slaves—cost him the respect of many Northern intellectuals but saved the situation, at least for a time. Yet the real news out of Washington was that the fissure in the country was becoming unbridgeable, and that the last efforts of the great survivors from the early republic—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster—would ultimately prove unavailing.