Melville intended to make Ahab a great man, and gave him just enough sanity to make us realize how great its loss had been.

Shakespeare was an inspiration to Melville in various ways, and surely so in imagining Ahab as a tragic figure in the classic sense—a great man brought down by his faults. In one sense Melville faced a task more difficult than for the Renaissance dramatists, for whom the status of a king or queen brought with it the culture’s deference toward that still powerful office, a position at the head of humanity with overtones of divine empowerment. If the protagonist was not a king, he was likely to be in line for it, the prince of possibility. Melville was acutely aware that modernity and democracy denied him that initial advantage, and it was only the beginning of an answer to make Ahab a sea captain, the ruler of his small world, which gave him station but not nobility.

Without hereditary claim, and only the formalities of shipboard as a substitute for court ceremonies, Ahab had to be constructed from the ground up as a man worthy of great regard. In “The Ship” there is a paragraph in which Ishmael lists the qualities necessary to produce “a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” (p. 106), and through the course of the book Melville does this by a series of references and actions that progressively make him much greater than a normal man. The first move is again to use an Old Testament name.

The biblical Ahab Melville had in mind was a powerful though evil king denounced, in both the Bible and the novel, by the prophet Elijah, who foretells his violent end. The warnings build as Ishmael is unable to learn much about him, and when Peleg says he “has his humanities” one wonders why something so apparently obvious needs to be said. Shadowy figures go aboard the Pequod and remain long in hiding, and other signs raise anxiety toward Ahab’s first appearance, where the imagery idealizes him in both his suffering and his stature.

The metaphors make him a man who, though burned at the stake, was only hardened by it, who took a lightning strike and showed only a scar like a great blasted tree, and who has the solidity of the famous Renaissance bronze Perseus, the son of Zeus whose supernatural feats included the killing of the Gorgon Medusa, the sight of whom turned men to stone (p. 158). Ahab is not of our world, far above us in suffering, survival, and force. His presence continues to grow with the strategies of his leadership, and in two of the book’s most remarkable chapters, the narrator works to make us as sympathetic as possible toward Ahab’s purpose. “Moby Dick” (chap. XLI) shows that his mad obsession is in intention generous toward all mankind, and “The Whiteness of the Whale” (chap. XLII) universalizes the awe and wonder at the whale’s beauty and the terror of its power and hue, a process begun in the Extracts that precede the narrative.

All this contributes to the status of the novel’s dark protagonist, a great man made dangerous by his crazed reaction to a dreadful accident. As sea captain, he is restrained only by the need to maintain the crew’s obedience, and except for a few they join his hunt because of his gift for mesmerizing ceremony. Only the ship’s officers hold back: He will insult Starbuck and Stubb, the first and second mates, but when he must he’ll give way just enough to blunt opposition, and this is not agreement but a means to his end.

In creating Ahab, Melville was responding to one of the great issues of the time: the role of the individual in a culture that was increasingly democratic—that decentralized the old nodes of power and was at the time becoming more and more industrialized—that concentrated economic and often political power in new hands. Like the English social commentator Thomas Carlyle, whose work he knew, Melville was acutely aware of the cost involved in the new economy. In Redburn, he had vividly described the horrors of a Liverpool slum, and in the paired sketches “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” he bitterly contrasted the comforts of luxury and the dehumanizing demands of the early factory system.

Involved in these cultural shifts was a stronger emphasis on the powerful person as the chief agent of historical change, and social commentators argued urgently for moral leadership on the part of those who could bring influence to bear. In England, Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1841) was a major call for such dedication. In America, Emerson and Thoreau stressed the proper cultivation of the self in the context of a democratic scene. Both saw a society in which too many defined the opportunities of individualism as money and position, and they called for personal growth informed by an openness to spiritual values working through the life of nature.

The greater emphasis on the individual mind found diverse literary expression up to Melville’s time, from the Byronic hero to the protagonists of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both published in 1847). In America, Charles Brockton Brown and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed psychological derangement and its effects, and by the time Melville met Hawthorne the older man had already written much about how a will to dominate can distort the personality and damage others. Though Ahab’s imperial mind has little interest in money, he is crazily bent on the exercise of power—he manipulates men with great skill and flamboyance as though they were “mechanical,” as he says of Stubb, the second mate, and he later extends the term to the general crew.

Ahab is, finally, an “isolato” of the kind we find elsewhere in Melville and in Hawthorne as well: the man who cuts himself off from his fellows out of an egotistical illusion of superiority often combined with an obsession with revenge. Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter (1850) is like Ahab in his desire for retribution, an obsession in both figures that erodes their humanity as they become morally destructive to themselves and to others. But Ahab has a grandeur that protects him from Chillingworth’s unworthiness, a largeness of character born of the vast scale of his purpose combined with his intermittent self-knowledge. At times Ahab knows what he has done to himself, but the awareness is rapidly overridden by the hatred that drives his all-powerful will, a will that in the world of the Pequod nothing can stop except his death.

Ahab is at the same time a grand figure of Romantic individualism and an example of individualism gone terribly wrong; he sums up what is both noble and lethal in the cult of the great man. At the climax of his speech to the corpusants, the rare but real glowing lights that can form at the ends of the spars, Ahab declares that “a personality stands here”; he has in mind an unfettered assertion of the self in its worldly practice, and one may remember that Walt Whitman later said repeatedly that Leaves of Grass was the expression of an American personality during its time in the nineteenth century. In letters, one can watch such assertions work themselves out for ill or good; in life, the issue is at what point the unfettered self must be checked for the common good. It is understandable that at the height of twentieth-century totalitarianism, some readers saw Ahab as a fascist type, but that is a limited view.