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English 2327
Final Examination
Due On May 7, 2008
Mr. Seiferth
Directions: Write a coherent, well-documented, well-developed essay on the topic which follows. Remember to write from a thesis and to substantiate what you say with relevant references to both the primary and secondary sources. Use the MLA Documentation Form for citing your references. This is a formal paper which means it should be developed from a series of drafts, typed, and double-spaced. THIS PAPER IS DUE ON OR BEFORE THE TIME OF THE FINAL EXAMINATION or As Specifically Assigned.
The Topic
Tragedy has to do with a person of energy and depth trapped outside the human race. When this person recognizes his or her exclusion, he or she enters a dark night of suffering where he or she is stripped of all but his or her soul. At this point he or she is most free. Being most free this person chooses the destiny of his or her own soul rather than forcing another destiny that is not of his or her MOIRA (fatedness). Then he or she submits to a higher power. The community from which the tragic figure has been a scapegoat is left disordered but with the promise of a renewal. In the process the tragic figure moves from rational analysis to a more intuitive apprehension of the whole. The tragic figure moves from one mode of knowing to another mode of knowing. The divine intercedes and completes the action.
The Romantic journey begins in a static universe which fails
to respond to the needs of the Romantic hero. The hero then
"bottoms out" in almost a full sense of despair. A spiritual rebirth
occurs, and the hero reorders his or her universe. The hero then
returns to the world he or she left and affirms meaning in the cosmos
or at least meaning. (Spiritual Death-Spriitual Rebirth-Affirmation)
Next, read Sewall's essays on "The Tragic Form" and "Moby-Dick".
The Topic
Write an essay in which you compare Ahab with Ishmael in terms of Ahab as tragic hero and Ishmael as Romantic hero.
In Moby Dick, if Ahab is searching for absolute meaning in the universe, Ishmael discovers that there may be only ultimate meanings and that one of these meanings is that there are no absolutes. Ahab's search is tragic while Ishmael's is a journey, not unlike that of Dante in The Divine Comedy. Trace the journeys of both of these men, and be specific in terms of the episodes in the novel which reveal these actions. You will find our notes on "Moby Dick and the Book of Job" by C. Hugh Holman very helpful. (See the notes under the arrow.)
C. HUGH HOLMAN. "THE RECONCILIATION OF ISHMAEL: MOBY DICK AND THE BOOK OF JOB." South Atlantic Quarterly LVII (Autumn, 1958) 477-90.
The influence of Job is pervasive and controlling, basic and thematic, the most informing single principle of the book's composition.
To Melville, who has 47 verses in Job marked or annotated, and all of them dealing with the darkness of life, the inscrutability of god, the desire for self-justification, or the mighty attributes of Leviathan, the Book was apparently an elemental poetic drama of a just man unjustly suffering, flinging indignantly aside the simple answers of his would-be comforters, and demanding a hearing and an accountability before his God, finally to be overwhelmed into awed acceptance when that God spoke through a whirlwind and pointed to the vastness and inscrutability of His created universe as proof that His ways are beyond knowing, pointing particularly to Leviathan of the deep as the most impressive and the vastest of His created things. This tormented, patriarchal Job, living in the dawn of religious thought, had no assurance of immortality. Melville marked three times the fourteenth chapter in which Job asks his dark question about a future life: "But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" He also marked the ninth verse of the despairing seventh chapter: "As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more."
Melville seems to have been speaking much for himself when he praised the author of the Mosses for having a "touch of Puritanic gloom," and said: "this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free."
Melville owed the Book of Job for the central fact and symbol of his novel, the great white whale, Moby Dick. Beginning with the 38th Chapter of Job, God answers Job out of the whirlwind. The answer consists of a linked chain of questions, the object of which is to teach Job humility by making him comprehend that God's power and majesty are unknowable. Beginning, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding," God moves from the creation, "when the morning stars sang together," through the marvels of inanimate nature to those of animate nature--the mountain goat, the wild ass, the wild ox, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk, and in the 40th chapter, Behemoth, the greatest land creature. Chapter 41 continues this taunting questioning, centering it around the symbol of Leviathan, the greatest of all creatures, described in terms of his physical strength and destructive might. God concludes, "Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride." Job, one of those children of pride, declares, "I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not," and although his own suffering has not lessened nor the riddle of evil in his world been answered, he rests, apparently with God's blessing, on an acceptance of the intermingled good and evil of his world. It was to these last chapters that Melville was indebted for the primary symbolic value of Moby Dick.
THE LITERAL WHALE REMAINS A PORTION OF THE SOLID BEDROCK ON WHICH MOBY DICK RESTS; BUT HE IS ALSO TRANSFORMED INTO THE ENCOMPASSING METAPHOR AND THE CENTRAL IMAGE FOR WHATEVER MEANING THE BOOK HAS. The principal agent in effecting this transformation is the narrator-hero Ishmael; for it is the play of mind, wit, of word, and of feeling that invests the comparatively simple action of the plot and the large masses of factual data in the cetological chapters with depth and meaning.
Ahab is Shakespearean tragedy, Ishmael is "Divine Comedy"--journey.
Ishmael serves a dual function in the novel. He is first of all the young Ishmael, a worthy bearer of his Biblical name, for he is a spiritual outcast, who seems to feel that it may be said of him as it was of his prototype: "His hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him." This Ishmael, at the opening of the novel, finding it a "damp, drizzly November in [his] soul," goes to the sea as a "substitute for pistol and ball." It is this young, unhappy man who is the center of the narrative for the first 100 pages but is gradually depressed into his role as merely one of Ahab's fated crew, while more and more his and out attention is centered on his monomaniac captain. Yet most of the story is presented not only through Ishmael's retrospective memory, but with his comment and interpretation, the interpretation of a mellowed and mature Ishmael. The young Ishmael in despair and rebellion, had set sail on the Pequod as a act of symbolic self-destruction; for he said, "With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship." The mature narrator has a far different attitude of spirit: "...amid the tornado Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy." This later Ishmael it is whose attitudes, comments, thoughts, and wit lend to a simple narrative a depth of meaning.
From Whale Fact to Whale Symbol, Ishmael accomplishes this through symbolic language.
Ishmael sees the terrors of the whale universe: see earlier chapters on his comments of pictures of whales and whale fossils.
"Here then, was this grey-headed ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale around the world." Yet Ishmael sees not only the terrors but also the wonders of this vast creature. The quantities of his dark and light (and by implication truth) that he provides for man, the ivory he yields, the vastness of the industry he supports, the extent to which he has made New England men masters of the seas--these beneficent aspects of the whale are always before us. And other and calmer attributes of Leviathan are suggested. When Moby Dick is at last sighted, Ishmael exclaims: "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...did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swan."
REPOSE IN SWIFTNESS=fundamental ambiguity towards the whale.
The quality of REPOSE often becomes serenity for Ishmael. As he squeezes the sperm (case), that is kneads sperm oil to prevent its coagulating, he says, "I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever." He imagines that devoutness is a characteristic of the whale, saying, :I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes....I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings."
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS A M B I G U O U S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE WHALE IS DEVELOPED STEADILY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK.
At the beginning of the novel Ishmael says that he "could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill." Yet when he sees the great white whale, he exclaims:
On each side...on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Nowhere does this quality of inscrutable ambiguity come out more plainly than in the famous "Whiteness of the Whale" chapter, where Ishmael tries to explain the "well nigh ineffable" quality of the white whale to inspire horror. "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me," he declares. "This whiteness" he asserts, "is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things...and yet...it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Ishmael concludes, "...like willful travelers, in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him." In the novel it is Ahab who is the infidel blind from staring too long at this inscrutable symbol. There is no question that the whale, whether agent or principle, is to Captain Ahab a cardboard mask through which he can strike at the inscrutable malice of the universe. The White Whale swam before him [Ishmael says] as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them....All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick."
And what was Moby Dick to Ishmael? At the beginning of the "Whiteness of the Whale" chapter, he says, "What the White Whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid." It is not only in this chapter that Ishmael defines the whale for himself; it is in the entire novel. Early in the voyage he, says, "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine." But this was a position in which he did not rest. His immense quality of wonder, his ability to look questioningly, his unwillingness to accept answers as final, enabled him to see Moby Dick not as evil or as good, but as the "interlinked terrors and wonders of God." It is these terms that the cetology chapters are an integral part of the book and not partially digested informational addenda; it is in these terms that the play of Ishmael's wit and though over the facts of whaling and of whales is appropriate; and it is in these terms that Ishmael's inquiring and reflective mind controls and informs the book, becomes both its center and its hero. Ishmael's problem was RECONCILIATION TO THE NATURE OF HIS WORLD. The novel had opened when, in his own words, his "hypos" had got an "upper hand" on him and it required "a strong moral principle to prevent [him] from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off." Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner, gives his the first lesson in acceptance, and he doubles his world by pledging eternal friendship with this heathen seller of shrunken heads. Early in the novel he is able to see this bond to Queequeg, symbolically represented by "the monkey rope," and to say, "I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a moral wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge me into unmerited disaster and death." See also chapter 10. While squeezing case, he also has what is almost a mystical experience..."that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his concept of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bid, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally." THIS LAST STATEMENT COMES FROM A MAN WHO HAD THE UNCONTROLLABLE URGE TO KNOCK PEOPLE'S HATS OFF! The climax of the voyage for, and the intellectual climax of the novel, occurs when Ishmael, steering the boat, gazes too long into the red flames of the try-pot fires (flames that are by then established as symbols of Ahab's madness) and turns himself around, so that recovering himself, he cannot see the compass. "Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness," he says. "Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern." Then, realizing that he has been turned around, he rights himself just in time to keep the vessel from capsizing. "How glad and how grateful," he exclaims, "the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night." Ishmael is going through his BAPTISM OF FIRE. Out of the experience he brings his redeeming knowledge, and he cries:
"Look not too long in the face of fire, O man! Turn not thy back to the compass...believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright.... Nevertheless the sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two third of this earth....The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.... Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." (ITALICS, MINE)
That last sentence defines a portion of the thematic organization of the book. "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." For much of the book is ordered around the idea of a woe that is madness. Ahab is the "mad old man," whose woe has driven him to catastrophic insanity; he is, as he declares, "madness maddened." It is the titanic fury of his insane rage that so compellingly envelops us that we, like Ishmael, are momentarily blinded by the red flames. The outgrowth of Ishmael's being the only survivor "buoyed up by [a] coffin...floated on a soft and dirgelike main" was not madness for Ishmael; it was wisdom--the wisdom of Job, as bodied forth in the Leviathan and in Moby Dick. The unique salvation of Ishmael is essential to the theme of the novel. He alone of those on the Pequod has faced with courage of humility the facts of his universe; he alone has learned to know woe without becoming mad. There is no necessity that Ishmael live in the action and plot of the novel; there is necessity that he survive inherent in the moral order of the universe in which Melville puts him--the primitive, pre-Christian universe of Job. In that universe he has learned, as man must if he is to live in his world, the lesson of acceptance. The mixed good and evil in all things, the prevalence of suffering in the world, the horror in which at times the universe seems formed--these he has come to take without fright and without affront. He tells us, "Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in." He has discovered how, "amid the tornadoes Atlantic of [his] being...for ever centrally [to] disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around [him]," to meet that woe without madness, and "deep down and deep inland still [to] bathe [him] in eternal mildness of joy." As it had neither for him has the riddle of evil and suffering found answer. HE HAS DISCOVERED A CENTER OF CALM AND REPOSE WITHIN HIMSELF, BUT IS A CALM THAT KNOWS, AS HE SAYS, "THOUGH IN MANY OF ITS ASPECTS THIS VISIBLE WORLD SEEMS FORMED IN LOVE, THE INVISIBLE SPHERES WERE FORMED IN FRIGHT." Like Job, Ishmael has rebelled against the order of the universe; like Job, too, a vast inscrutable symbol of incomprehensible reality has loomed before him in the form of a great whale. And like Job, Ishmael has learned that, though in this darkly imperfect world wisdom is woe, still man must learn to avoid the woe that is madness. He knows that there is no alternative to shouldering the burden of this ambiguous and affrighting world.
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