Ahab as Thanatos:
Melville himself was caught and fascinated by his hero.’ Using
this statement as a starting point, discuss the role of Ahab in Moby-Dick
‘Like Hawthorne’s
Chillingworth and Ethan Brand, Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he
[Ahab] is at once heroic and evil, grand and megalomaniac.’[1]
It’s clear that
Melville was caught and fascinated by Ahab, who is not technically the hero of
Moby Dick. That title goes to
Ishmael but his character, along with Queequeg, who Melville becomes less and
less interested, and eventually kills off out of what I think was boredom, as
the book goes on. In terms of an
adventure story it makes more sense to have the story revolve around a larger
than life character, such as Ahab, who has the most invested in the voyage of
the Pequod and the most to gain out of it. Ishamael is really only needed to give information about
whales to the reader because he is somewhat well read and has an enormous
(almost whale-like) interest in whales.
The story is Ahab’s story and he might as well be the hero, or anti-hero
depending on your view. In this
essay I will be looking at Ahab from various perspectives and attempting to
gauge what expect opinion has to offer on such a well-known figure while
offering up my own opinions on the matter.
Ahab eclipse all
other characters in the book, he becomes the central character and almost
single-handedly drives the story on.
He is in Ishamael’s terms, and some of the other crew’s, mad, driven and
possessed by madness. His madness
comes from the source of a white sperm whale, given the name Moby Dick, who
once bit off the leg of Ahab who has never forgiven it since and vows to
destroy the creature when he finds it.
He uses the
Pequod, a vessel with the job of collecting whale oil, for his own ends in
tracking this solitary creature in the depths of the ocean. It seems like a hopeless task. How can one, especially without modern
equipment, ever hope to find one animal amongst a whole sea of them? Yet he is demonic on this point and
carries on regardless of his life or of the life of his crew. Why the crew sticks with this overly
aggressive type of personality and follows him is beyond me. Only Starbuck has the good sense to
voice his opposition to such a voyage, and is yet tragically, maybe more tragic
than the anti-hero, duty-bound to do what the Captain says.
Ahab could be
described as a dictator, or at least having a dictators’ sense of larger than
life charisma, except the crew seem to be very willing to oblige. I didn’t get a sense of much opinion
being generated from the other sections of the boat and so their motivations
are questionable. Presumably they
just want to work and earn a living not really caring who is in charge just so
long they can get the job done. When
Ahab pins the doubloon upon the mast, awarded to the first person who spots
Moby Dick, he is motivating the crew with a particular greed of gold in order
get the result he wants and this makes him a peculiar type of capitalist. At the end he claims to have spotted
Moby Dick for himself making the show of putting it up there in the first place
a little redundant. Ahab is like a
casino where the ultimate winner will always be him.
Melville was very
interested in religion and philosophy as it litters and fills the pages of his
book. He seemed to be preempting
the ideas of later philosophers and psychologists such as Nietzsche and
Freud. He had a very keen insight
and this is represented in the figure of Ahab, who could be taken as a symbol
of the essence of man driven by aggressive primal motivations, or in Freudian
terms: Thanatos. If the whale
symbolises God, which it could as well as many other things, than Ahab becomes
this Prometheus figure challenging the deity that is unjust (in Ahab’s
eyes). Ahab could be a symbol of
Renaissance man who is superior to nature and must posses it in order to
control it. Ahab could represent a
modern man’s inelastic death wish ending with the whiteness of emptiness. ‘“I am immortal then, on land and on
sea”’[2]
says Ahab and he seems to believe it to at one point, at another he says: ‘“I’d
strike the sun if it insulted me”’[3]
and seems to mean it here too.
Being immortal would make it easier to hunt a quasi-mythic creature and
kill it. But it is Ahab’s
foolhardiness that causes the deaths of not only himself but the rest of his
crew. Brian Way says ‘His [Ahab’s]
reckless challenge is an expression of modern man’s refusal to accept the
infinite, to believe that there can be any force superior to his own powers of
understanding and control’[4]. The whale cannot be tamed, nature or
God must have its way with human beings and destroy any that try to destroy
it. When Melville mentions the
myth of Narcissus Richard Chase points out that:
‘To be Ahab is to be unable to resist the hypnotic attraction of the
self with its impulse to envelop and control the universe.’[5]
‘“Canst thou
draw out leviathan with a hook?”’ asks God to Job when he questions the justice
of his disease and here it is this question that Melville asks of his
characters, whose jobs are to do precisely that. They do kill whales on their journey but are ultimately
destroyed by the mightiest of the whales.
Perhaps Melville
found Ahab so captivating was because he is the most extreme out of all of the
characters, even more so than Queequeg when he prays.
I said earlier
that Ahab was not the hero but Alfred Kazin in his “Introduction” to Moby-Dick says of Ahab being a hero ‘We cannot insist enough on
that’[6]
his point being that Ahab is a particularly American hero who tries to
‘reassert man’s place in nature’.
This is a vision of an American hero who vision is grand and whose
character is strong. Nick Selby in
Icon Critical Guides says that:
‘the captain’s career is prophetic of many others in the history of
later nineteenth-centaury America.
Man’s confidence in his own unaided resources has seldom been carried
farther than during that era in this country.’[7]
There is something
to compare Ahab with another more recent American character that is undone by
American dreams and vision and that is Willy Loman of Arthur Miller’s play
‘Death of a Salesman’. Perhaps
there is not much purchase in such a comparison as the two settings and
circumstances are different but the motivational drive that gets these two characters
up in the morning are somewhat similar and must reflect something in American
literature which keeps returning to such a theme. Kazin goes on to say that
‘Melville has no doubt…that Ahab’s quest is humanly understandable’. To a
point I would say but a little like Loman’s blindness Ahab is blind with power
and wrath, which are doubtless human traits but they are not entirely
understandable as they stand for what’s irrational in human nature. He ends the chapter with:
‘What concerns Melville is not merely the heroism that gets
expressed in physical action, but the heroism of thought itself as it rises
above its seeming insignificance and proclaims, in the very teeth of a
seemingly hostile and malevolent creation, that man’s voice is heard for something against the watery waste and the deep, that
man’s thought has an echo in the universe.’
This is certainly a very persuasive way of looking at the book but I am not totally convinced. For one Ishmael, the main character and disembodied narrator of the book, has no obvious qualms about the universe. He follows a very practical and forthright way of living and his scientific need to understand, that which is inscrutable, at least to Ahab’s mind, is very orderly and rational. I would argue that Ishamael fears the wild and unpredictable tyranny of the Captain to the dangers of the whales, as they manage to kill at least two on the journey, so whales seem to have already been suppressed under man’s rule.
This book has much
in common with Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ where the tyranny, and
madness, of one man forges the destiny of those around him and ultimately
succumbs to a fate of his own making.
For Ahab ‘the horror the horror’ would be the whiteness of the whale,
which for him symbolizes the totality of evil in the world.
He is what I would
call a damaged character. His
brush with the white whale has clearly affected him and the whole of his
life. Ahab now constructs his life
around his wound and it becomes his raison d'etre for his future. Melville
might have found interesting in Ahab is that he exemplifies man’s competition
with animals, co-habiting the world with them and the necessity of killing them
for food. Man, Melville could be
saying, is inherently a vicious and deadly killer and anything that tries to
challenge that is worthy of either worship or death and Ahab is a good
character to symbolise this. I
might be taking on a rather hopeless task for myself in exploring a man for
which ‘no such simple formula for understanding Ahab’ exists. In some ways he is as inscrutable as
the whale he is chasing, we all think we know what he is thinking, but really what
is he thinking? How does he hope his adventure to turn out and then what
will happen to his life when the main purpose of it has been taken out of the
equation? Ahab has been likened to
Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ and indeed the similarities can be found in William
Hazlitt’s ‘Character of Shakespeare’s Plays’:
‘The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and
the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves,
but still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the
sea’
How apt for this
essay for Hazlitt to reach for a nautical metaphor and yet this bears out a
good pint about the storms that Lear/Ahab have to go through storms that exist
primarily in their minds .
Melville doesn’t
abandon Ishmael entirely, his function is reduced in the second half of the
book but his presence is still, well, present. Ishmael is the counterpoint to Ahab, he is the reflective,
scholarly, scientific personality that while enjoying being part of a
collective mob also is an individual and is the only one who survives the
Pequod’s disastrous voyage. So
domineering is Ahab’s character, and so extreme is his emotion, that he swamps
the book with his mad mission and Ishmael is swayed under him. Interestingly, and incredible as it may
be, Ahab is a family man who has a wife, though her name is not given and very
little about her is mentioned.
It’s almost as if Ahab was purposely trying to forget her or devotes so
little time to her because of his obsession with the white wale. One wonders why Melville even bothered
to give Ahab a back-story beyond ‘leg taken by Moby Dick’ but perhaps Melville
had plans to make Ahab a more rounded character and never really got round to
it. It does hint at more
interesting developments in Ahab’s character.
Every critic that
talks about Moby Dick also mentions Ahab’s main characteristic and the word
they use is monomania. This is the
sort of obsessive personality that you would find in an Edgar Allen Poe story,
resembling a little A Descent Into the Maleström. Although Ahab isn’t usually consided to
be a gothic character he does have some similarity to the crazed persons that
linger on the pages of the gothic story, and Ahab does revolve his existence
around killing an animal which is in it’s own way somewhat morbid. H. Bruce Franklin in his ‘The Wake of
the Gods’ comments that ‘Ahab’s mind is free to define Moby Dick.’[8]
And this brings up an important point.
We do not know what the white whale thinks of Ahab because we have no
access to its thoughts so in order to live in the world do we have to project
our grudges and personalities onto the non-human environment or can we distance
ourselves away from anthropocentric presumptions? Ishamael doesn’t symbolise the whale with his own personal
emotion but rather he treats the whale as a source of scientific inquiry and
worship. Ahab on the other hand
has no scientific leanings but goes only on gut instinct and brute force
emotion. He, in some way,
humanises the whale and makes it a villain when it’s symbol as goodness/evil is
in question, notably in the chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ where Ishamael
ponders the colour of the whale and its significance to human mythology. ‘…Whiteness refining enhances
beauty…whiteness has been even made significant of gladness…this same hue is
made the emblem of many touching, noble things…Witness the white bear of poles,
the white shark of the tropics…’[9] This reminds me of a scene in Umberto
Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ where the heroine is relating to the hero all the
different meanings the human body can have, showing that a single object can
have many meanings or that because of the jumble of meanings it really means
that there are no ultimate meanings to explain everything. Here the symbol of the whiteness of the
whale is overburdened with meaning and it overwhelms Ishmael. Potentially Melville could be making an
eco-critical point that nature is whatever we decide it to be and that it
necessarily human-centric.
It would be
interesting to find out if Captain Ahab was based on any single personality,
such as then president of the United States Millard Fillmore, but no critic
that I came across mentions such a person. We then have to deduce that it was likely Melville was
thinking of a conglomeration of some of the more extreme leaders and explorers in
history, the men that kill in the thousands and are the very essence of
destruction. More than that his
characters are more personifications of various ideas of life and living. Ishmael as Eros, the sensitive,
reflective, philosophical and Ahab as Thanatos, driven, aggressive and suicidal. As Alfred Kazin says:
‘With the entry of Ahab a harsh new rhythm enters the book, and from
now on two rhythms- one reflective, the other forceful- alternate to show us
the world in which man’s thinking and man’s doing each follows its own law.’
One has to wonder
whether Melville started out with Ahab in mind or whether he was just an after
thought that became something bigger.
It would be hard to conceive of such a story without it’s main
hero/villain, who is the cornerstone of the plot, being present at the
beginning. Maybe the story was
more about Ishmael and his fascination with whales, but he puts in a bland
Captain to begin with before changing his mind for a more interesting character
and whose ego overrides the whole
narrative. To me this is how it
reads and it only adds to its disjointedness.
In this essay I
have discussed how Ahab’s hero status is in question, how Melville must have
got caught up with his character for him to dominate so much of the latter half
of the novel and also how he was just a little ahead, or perhaps exactly of,
his time in terms of philosophy and psychology. The figure of Ahab is an iconic one that cuts sharp the
world around him into distinct sections of black and white, an awe inspiring
and terrifying character who has firmly made it as part of the literary canon
and makeup of modern America and English Literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Chase, Richard, ‘Melville and Moby-Dick’
in Melville ed. by Richard Chase (Prentice-Hall,
Inc: Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1962)
Selby, Nick, Icon Critical Guides
Herman Melville: Moby Dick (Reading: Cox &
Wyman Ltd, 1998)
[1] Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
[1] Way, Brian, Herman Melville: Moby Dick, (Southhampton: Camelot Press,1977) p41
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