The novel Moby Dick contains two journey plots: Ahab’s quest
to find the great white whale that dismembered him and Ishmael’s more poetic
search for the “Truth”. These two plots represent two forms of “being”. The first
belongs to the material world of whaling, which is the world of commodities. The
other comes from the worlds of ideals, which sees the whale as an idea or as “a
symbol of being”, as claimed by Bryant.
The two plots combined together in the novel, “loomed” into one tale,
symbolize in my opinion the dilemma of authorship that Melville was engaged
with: having to a make a living by writing, but unable to sell book that
contained his search for “Truth”.
Ishmael’s quest for the truth is a transcendental journey, and that
is why he goes to sea. In order to reach his goal, he must connect to God through
nature, in the most unmediated way.
In contrast, lays Ahab, the tragic Shakespearian character, who
seeks to control nature and demolish it instead of reading it to find truth,
only to perish at the end.
Melville creates Ahab as a tragic character only to rebel against
the literary conventions represented by Shakespeare, which ultimately belong to
the “old” world. The underlying message is that literature should be democratic
and not attempt to mediate the “Truth” to the reader. The reader, as a rational
human being, can use literature as a tool to reach the understanding of being.
Melville uses American freedom of speech as the answer to the restraints on
thought and creativity, portrayed by Shakespeare. However, this also brings us
back to the problem of authorship, since the ability to write freely does not guarantee
an enthusiastic audience. In this sense, Moby Dick is also the author’s
journey to find the solution to speak and also to be heard, doomed to fail by
the forces of economy and the ignorence of the masses.
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