He is a figure complex enough always to be characteristic of tendencies in any social and political form.

Starbuck and Pip are the only ones who try to dissuade Ahab, one the second in command, the other at the bottom of the ship’s roster. Starbuck is a good man who goes about his business in a levelheaded way, and who shows his decency as he tries to stop Flask from lancing a sick whale just to cause pain: “There’s no need of that!” (p. 418). When Ahab announces his purpose, Starbuck tells him that he has signed on to hunt whales, not his captain’s vengeance. Ahab tries to bribe him, but then takes the measure of his three mates and sees that in the face of the crew’s enthusiasm they can be controlled if not enlisted.

Though Starbuck lives by Christian values, he even thinks of killing Ahab, but can’t bring himself to violence against a man he otherwise reveres; and before the last day of the chase he makes a final appeal: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” (p. 649). But these are thoughts and comments, and he cannot take effective action against a man who renders opposition harmless through personal force and the orchestration of emotional rituals.

A more serious threat to Ahab’s aim is “the little negro Pippin” who was saved “by the merest chance” after he jumped out of a whaleboat in fright and sinking deep “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (p. 481). The experience drove him mad, and it is his helplessness that makes Ahab pity his complementary opposite.

Pip’s voice carries more than an echo of King Lear’s Fool, whose lack of power gives him license to speak the truth. Ahab is touched but must push away his own compassion as dangerous: “There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady” (p. 610). Both Ahab and Pip are largely, though not entirely, insane: Ahab’s derangement is a pathological expansion of the self, while Pip’s is just the opposite; his identity has been emptied out by his brush with death and divinity. When Ahab leaves the cabin after they talk, Pip speaks of himself in the third person: “Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding. Who’s seen Pip?” (p. 611). This is the castaway’s opposing parallel to Ahab’s address to the corpusants: “Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights” (p. 580).

Style

When, in “The Ship,” Ishmael is describing what is required to portray the character who will be Ahab, he mentions “a bold and nervous lofty language” (p. 106), and while this well describes Ahab’s speech, it points more generally to Melville’s greatest achievement in the novel—the flexibility and brilliance of one of the great styles in English.

All accomplished writers develop characteristic styles in which purpose and technique become one. Many writers have one consistent manner, but there are others like Melville or Mark Twain or William Faulkner who develop multiple styles and use one or the other depending on what they wish to do. In Moby-Dick, there are three basic patterns; they are by no means always neatly separated but are enough unlike to warrant separate notice. First, there is neutral, straightforward exposition; the longest sustained passage of this kind is in chapter LXVII, “Cutting In.” The language is direct, lucid, and in the best sense simple, as we are told how blubber is removed from the whale’s carcass. The narrator’s personality is hardly present, and the chapter could have been written by another skillful writer closely familiar with the process. This is the narrator’s plain style; there are many shorter passages of this kind throughout the work.

The second and most frequent tone is the one we hear as the novel opens: We are in the hands of a narrator whose personality is much in view as he tells us about his depressions and self-destructive thoughts, but he does so in a jaunty, half-joking way that entertains by the extremity of his imagined actions. Exaggeration is Ishmael’s stock in trade for both comic and serious purposes. He is “given to pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet” (p. 27), remarks that are caricatures of the truth, but that leave the truth in place. Rhetorical extremes are wonderfully flexible in Melville’s hands; they are often funny but can also move to exultation and mythic power. For a paragraph we hear rather mocking talk of black moods and aggression; he thinks of pistol and ball—these could be used against himself or others, and he also feels like “methodically knocking people’s hats off” (p.