That it takes the form of metaphor strengthens the intellectual position by embodying the thought in physical form, a representative example of how Melville uses such language. What saves these passages from excess is a fierce intelligence that fuses idea and image, and when this is done with the frequency and consistency found in Moby-Dick, it is the gift of a major poet, though in prose.

Perhaps the most extravagant passage of this kind is, in chapter CXIX, “The Candles” (p. 576), Ahab’s speech to the corpusants. It is likely that Shakespeare’s King Lear lies behind this passage. While at work on the novel, Melville read or reread several of the tragedies, and one sees the effects in various ways, anachronistically so in the “dramatic” scenes complete with stage directions. That influence certainly strengthened the book, and Lear’s character in part contributed to Ahab. In act 3, scene 2, Lear, half crazed on the heath and beaten by the storm, begins to move toward the humility with which he ends. For Ahab, of course, there is no remedy for his obsession, which drives him and his crew to their deaths. In the measure that we are moved by Ahab’s speech, even though unsympathetic to his intent, it is because we have come to know that he is awe-inspiring in his personal force and the deranged purity of his aim. This is why the passage comes late in the book: Melville had needed time to create Ahab as a man mad and magnificent enough to berate lightning during a typhoon.

The language here, as in many other passages in Moby-Dick, becomes almost Shakespearean in its power, through anarchism of vocabulary, strong disruption of modern word order, and great intensity of feeling. Occasional phrases even fall into the pentameter line of Renaissance drama; the speech is a version of the dramatic monologue of two and a half centuries earlier quite transformed for Melville’s purposes.

Humor

The exalted rhetoric of this kind is all the more effective because we encounter it only from time to time: Such flamboyance can’t be sustained for long without the reader’s fatigue, and one of the reasons it is so moving in Moby-Dick is that it rises from a foundation of skeptical intelligence and good humor. The comedy in the novel is central to its power.

The narrator had worried about how to raise his “low” materials to the level of tragedy. While he transforms the ordinary into things rich and strange through his high language, he heads off our doubts about such exaltation by making fun of his ocean world before we do. When he moves into a passage of extreme language, we respond on his terms because we have come to trust his voice, one steadily aware of what is irregular, strange, or absurd. These discordances are often played for humor even as the language creates them.

Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, for example, comes to carry serious meaning, standing as it does for human affection and trust in a world of suspicion and danger. Yet Melville initially presents both men as comic figures, Queequeg because of his unchanged native habits complete with filed teeth, pagan idol, and a for-sale severed head in his bag, and Ishmael because of his quaking fear at the sight of such behavior. Once introduced, however, Queequeg is used to satirize foolish contempt for alien cultures and the smug complacencies of routine religious belief. He comes to be a figure of almost pure virtue and Ishmael’s anchor to windward.

In being amused at the world, the narrator gives us the impression that he knows what life looks like since he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He sees much that is entertainingly odd, and is not above pure slapstick when in “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (chap. LXXXII) he argues that Saint George killed not a dragon but a whale. This is the kind of tall-tale absurdity more common in our writers of the American West than in Melville’s part of the country.

Ahab and Moby Dick, the book’s two great antagonists, are never made the subjects of humor because comedy would diminish their status as monumental beings set apart from their kind. Moby Dick is from the beginning presented as a creature of mythic power and beauty; anticipation and awe increase as allusions to him appear. Ahab, in turn, is from his introduction shown to be larger than life, and though there are signs of his earlier nature, humor by him or about him would make him too much like the rest of us. At a much lower level, Starbuck is also exempt because he embodies solemn, sensible, and Christian opposition to Ahab’s plan; he is shocked and fearful, sane but unavailing as disaster looms.

Despite the solemnity of Ahab and Moby Dick, our sense of them, too, rests importantly on the book’s humor. The balance and objectivity of the comic view make more believable the narrator’s repeated departures from this familiar world into emotional states evoking wonder at mythic dimensions of malignity and beauty, power or peace, all these sometimes fused together as in our first actual sight of the whale as the hunt approaches its end:

A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight from the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam (p. 626).

Remarkable here is the combination of contrary states: peace and violence, mildness and force, repose and activity, love and simple lust, seduction and rape, and all of this intensified by the animal’s supernatural beauty and power borrowed from the chief of the classical gods. Much in Moby-Dick rises to this level of eloquence, and no other work in American literature surpasses it in this respect. And powerful as such a passage is, it would be less so had we not come to trust the narrator’s good sense as he earlier made light of the whale’s anatomy even as he is impressed by it. We can more easily believe him when he is in deadly earnest because he is not always so.

Symbolism

This passage and many others like it push toward possible meanings, and when Sophia Hawthorne wrote that the Spirit Spout seemed to have a significance beyond itself, she was pointing to a literary cast of mind that Melville shared with her husband.