What We've All Been Waiting For: Ahab v. Moby Dick

What We've All Been Waiting For: Ahab v. Moby Dick

Throughout Moby Dick, Herman Melville prepares his audience for the final encounter between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. Melville has educated us about the nature of whales, the perils of whaling, the various symbolic meanings of the color white, ect.

We have also watched Captain Ahab's obsession with killing Moby Dick steadily spin out of control. In addition to this, Melville has presented us with several prophecies of doom foretelling Ahab's destruction. Starbuck warns an irrational Captain Ahab, "Let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware thyself, old man!" (PG 362). And the prophet, Gabriel, preaches to Ahab,"Think, think of the blasphemer - dead and down there ! - beware the blasphemer's end" PG 253). While Melville forces his audience to wait three hundred pages for the final stand off between Ahab and Moby Dick, the ultimate outcome of this encounter is heavily foreshadowed and therefore, not very surprising. And yet...

Ahab's battle with Moby Dick is epic in the truest sense. He battles the whale for three days (does anyone else think this a Christian Passion reference?). In the midst of his battle, Ahab comes to terms with the folly of his endeavor but in spite of this realization, he continues to hunt the whale, displaying perseverance in the face of certain defeat (like Hector in The Iliad) . Like the epic heros Achilles and Oedipus and Goethe's Faust, Captain Ahab's great flaw is his hubris. At the same time, the zealous/arrogant act of choosing to do battle with an unbeatable beast is admirable. I was upset when Ahab was defeated.

This got me thinking: Is the highest heroic act of man to defy the unknowable/unbeatable? Is this why we admire Faust and, to some degree, Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost? In challenging the whale to battle, is Ahab displaying his free will as a human being or is he simply an idiot? Is is admirable to fight a fight you cannot win or just really really dumb?