Those Crazy Captains, Part II: Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab

I’ve done something for Herman Melville that I haven’t even done for some of the authors I’ve loved the most: I’ve read Moby Dick twice. The first time I read it was for high school—in fact, since I was home-schooled this was self-assigned literature reading on my part, since I had heard Moby Dick, or, The Whale, was a classical giant that everyone should read. I’d bought a very nice hardcover copy at my local library’s book-sale, some reproduction edition from the 1950’s with such deep-pressed type I could have read the words in the dark simply by tracing my fingers across it. 

I remember clearly sitting on a chair in my room, my feet propped up on my bed, and thinking, “This is the most boring thing I’ve ever read.”

I was, of course, in the mires of the fifteen or so chapters on Cetology. I know, I know, this was Herman Melville’s first foray into novel-writing, and besides the very art of novels was still being hashed out by writers. The rules that novelists today are bound by, like pacing and “show, don’t tell”, didn’t exist yet. But as a teenager I didn’t care.  

Once I got past the part where the narrator, this so-called “Ishmael,” stops being besties with the Noble Savage Queequeg on land and boards the Pequod, things go downhill. By the time I got to the foregone conclusion (and I will avoid spoilers even though for the most part the end of Moby Dick is as well-known as the end of the Titanic), I was rooting for the whale.  I’m just glad I chose the right side.

The second time I read this book was in college for a class. For most literature classes I usually skipped any books I’d already read in favor of studying the new material, but I decided maybe my Teenaged Self had lacked a sophistication in literary taste that I had naturally acquired since then, and in all fairness I gave this novel another shot. By that time I’d gotten rid of my (actually very good-quality) copy, and so borrowed my mom’s copy, a red canvas-bound hardcover.  

The major improvement on re-reading the thing was discovering mid-lecture that someone else (my mom’s copy was used as well) had made a flip-book on the bottom of this copy’s margins in ball-point pen. It showed a ship chasing a whale across the bottom of the page, only to be eaten by said whale. It was immensely entertaining, which was more than I could honestly say about the class itself. 

Now as a mature college student, I was a wiser, more seasoned reader who found that Moby Dick was not the most boring thing I'd ever read. This was because, as a mature college student, I'd naturally been assigned even more boring works, mostly by Virginia Woolf. Now I found even more to bug me about Melville's novel than mere tedium—although those Cetology chapters were still brutal.  Literature classes have a knack for finding the most lurid details of any story—even those that don’t really exist in the pages of said story—and then glorying in it.  The fate of the Pequod is totally justified in that they’re an evil whaling ship.  Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship suddenly has homoerotic undertones. Ishmael is so open-minded as to worship Queequeg’s idol in order to fully obey Christianity’s Golden Rule “do unto others.” And let’s not go into the whole spermaceti scene. 

What really infuriated me about this book was that it made me, as a reader, feel helpless.  This Ishmael guy, after getting on the ship, might as well have been a phantom passenger for all the effect he has on the course of events from then on. The main driving force of the book from that point on—so much so that it’s as if Ishmael passes the baton as soon as their characters interact—is Captain Ahab. 

Anyone who’s read the Bible knows at once that Captain Ahab is an employer to avoid just by merit of his name.* Yet the crew of the Pequod are loyal, devoted, and unquestioning of their captain. Even when it becomes clear that Ahab’s main goal is not to make a living harvesting oil, but to avenge himself against the one whale that took his leg. In short, and unsurprisingly (especially if you were paying attention to the title of this character series), the captain’s crazy. 

It’s totally understandable that Ahab should want revenge on the animal responsible for taking his leg. What’s insane is the length he goes to do it, endangering the entire ship—and the families of the crew who rely upon their lives for their livelihood. What’s perhaps more irrational still is that his crew are aware of what’s going on, and are on board—pardon the pun—with this mission. To Ahab, the White Whale, Moby-Dick, is the embodiment of evil, and to kill the whale is to save the world. 

  

*Ahab being one of the wickedest kings of Israel, leading the country into idolatry through the influence of his evil wife, Jezebel. Which makes one wonder what Captain Ahab’s wife is like, once the reader finds out he has one….