A classmate of mine, Shelly, wrote "I believe that Moby Dick does in fact represent God and Ahab's search for him is not for religion or mercy, but to avenge his misfortune - the bad things that have happened to him, such as losing his leg." This is an astute observation, I think, and warrants further investigation. As I've been reading through what at first seemed to be unrelated passages about the physiology and anatomy of whales, I've been thinking about how it all ties into a broader, more general idea, and I've come to the same conclusion as Shelly: that the whale is, in many ways, meant to represent God.
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| By EIMJ from deviantART |
This point becomes clearer, I think, with each chapter. In Ch. 68, he is described as "the mystic-marked whale" (276) covered in "undecipherable" hieroglyphs (lit. holy writings), and in Ch. 71, Gabriel, the crazed 'prophet' declares the White Whale to be "the Shaker God incarnated" (284). In Ch. 80, Ishmael comments that sperm whales cause one to "feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature, and Ch. 82 paints the whale as an alternate incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. These are just a few of the many references that place the whale within a context of deity.
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| By zraw from deviantART |
Possibly the most poignant and meaningful excerpt for me, however, comes in Ch. 87, wherein Ishmael describes the whale's tail. In closing off the chapter, Ishmael makes reference to a perhaps less-known passage in Exodus wherein Jehovah states: "And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen." Ishmael quotes this almost verbatim:
[If] I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen (339).Man is ignorant to the nature and the abode of both the whale and God, and while he may strive to comprehend those grand mysteries in this life, his senses are still darkened: he can never truly grasp them.
I'm glad to see you both building off of classmates' thoughts as well as quoting directly from the text (and pulling together relevant passages to make a point). Next step: see what others outside of our class have said / are saying about these topics. How would you go about doing that?
ReplyDeleteThis article by Thornton Y. Booth talks about several myths where men take on Gods, which got me thinking about how the intellectual climate of the age often determines how fictional characters will relate to God or the gods. In Greek myth, for instance, written during a time of intellectual enlightenment, men take on gods as equals, while stories written in highly religious eras like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tend to show bend bound by fate and honor that they cannot break. Check it out and see what you think: http://www.jstor.org.erl.lib.byu.edu/stable/view/2932815
ReplyDeleteThis could again be why Moby Dick got more popular at the turn of the century--at a time when new weapons and technology made men seem boundless--like they could take on God himself.
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