After explaining how property rights are established after a dead whale is temporarily abandoned, he asks, “What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish! And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” (p. 463). We should be annoyed if we thought that the story line were there only to set us up for the generalization, but Melville’s gifts as a storyteller prevent this: The comment rises from the action. While the passage is not about Ahab, it implies what is wrong with him—in his arrogance and isolation he denies the inevitable interdependence of personal identity and community, one of the novel’s great themes.

In a novel where ambition reaches out to some of the largest matters—man’s position in the natural world, the nature of charismatic rule in its moral dimensions, the very nature of reality itself—there are notable exclusions in Moby-Dick, though not through oversight. Important aspects of daily life are less represented than one would usually expect in a novel: Food, sleep, hygiene, pastimes are hardly present, nor matters of health—important on such a vessel—except for Queequeg’s illness.

These exclusions come about because the literary genre closest to Moby-Dick is not the traditional prose narrative, but the epic—a form in which the texture of common life is often treated lightly to allow concentration on the protagonist and heroic action. After the nights and steaks in New Bedford’s Spouter Inn and the meals of Mrs. Hussey’s Nantucket chowder, there is little detail of this kind once the Pequod leaves the dock, with four-fifths of the novel still to come.

Sexuality is powerfully present, but is more directly addressed in the ocean’s creatures than among the men who hunt them. There is the wonderful vision in “The Grand Armada” where the sailors see birth and nursing among a school of sperm whales. “Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seem divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep” (p. 451). But with the unsentimental realism so typical of Melville, this monumental ocean-pastoral is checked by the very hunt that allows the men to see it: The whalers are in the business of killing as many of these creatures as possible, and the cetacean mothers-milk will be red with blood.

Among the men these sexual issues are more guarded. It is of course a world without women; marriage and children are mentioned but never brought to life. Ahab has left his wife and child behind as almost all men did, but he has also done so emotionally, and while Peleg tells Ishmael that “Ahab has his humanities!” (p. 113) it is not a good sign that this needs to be said. Ahab’s initial isolation in his cabin is attributed to a serious wound in the groin inflicted by his whalebone leg, a sexual injury suggestive of what he has done to his own humanity. Less grimly, Queequeg compares the symbolism of Ahab’s gold doubloon, nailed to the mast, to “something in the vicinity of his thigh,” and Ishmael remarks, “I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer” (p. 503). These are coded references to energies that are more happily opened up at the Spouter Inn, where Ishmael and Queequeg become friends.

These two bear the book’s principal weight of affection, the love that best binds mankind together. In a later chapter they are on the two ends of a “monkey-rope,” Ishmael protecting his friend who is on the carcass of a whale with sharks attacking from below (chap. LXXII), and at the end of the book it is with Queequeg’s coffin that Ishmael saves himself. There are other characters who briefly show gentle and even affectionate recognition: Both Starbuck and Pip reach out to Ahab, who must rein in his momentary sympathies if he is not to be swayed from his purpose.

The matrimonial imagery of the Spouter Inn scenes is explicit, as Queequeg the first night holds Ishmael in “his bridegroom clasp,” but Ishmael finds this “a comic predicament” that he wishes to escape. The two become fast friends, and after talking in bed, “in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy loving pair” (p. 82). Queequeg tells the story of his life, and then “embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping” (p. 87). There has been controversy about this imagery, some seeing a movement toward romantic love. But one must be very careful before pushing Melville’s language into special meanings. More often than not such narrow readings do violence to Melville’s imaginative world, reducing rather than illuminating the resonance of the text. While it is true that the only fully happy ship the Pequod meets is called The Bachelor, one remembers that the permanent party on that ship’s deck includes the native girls who have run off with the sailors.

Ahab

While Ishmael and Queequeg are the repositories of fellow-feeling, Ahab has almost entirely killed that in himself, and on the few brief occasions when his cold resolve is softened by those “humanities” that Peleg had mentioned to Ishmael, he pushes that emotion away lest it keep him from his aim.