Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Herman Melville Read Free Book Online

a whale. This is the kind of tall-tale absurdity more common in our writers of the American West than in Melville’s part of the country.
    Ahab and Moby Dick, the book’s two great antagonists, are never made the subjects of humor because comedy would diminish their status as monumental beings set apart from their kind. Moby Dick is from the beginning presented as a creature of mythic power and beauty; anticipation and awe increase as allusions to him appear. Ahab, in turn, is from his introduction shown to be larger than life, and though there are signs of his earlier nature, humor by him or about him would make him too much like the rest of us. At a much lower level, Starbuck is also exempt because he embodies solemn, sensible, and Christian opposition to Ahab’s plan; he is shocked and fearful, sane but unavailing as disaster looms.
    Despite the solemnity of Ahab and Moby Dick, our sense of them, too, rests importantly on the book’s humor. The balance and objectivity of the comic view make more believable the narrator’s repeated departures from this familiar world into emotional states evoking wonder at mythic dimensions of malignity and beauty, power or peace, all these sometimes fused together as in our first actual sight of the whale as the hunt approaches its end:
    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; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight from the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam (p. 626).
    Remarkable here is the combination of contrary states: peace and violence, mildness and force, repose and activity, love and simple lust, seduction and rape, and all of this intensified by the animal’s supernatural beauty and power borrowed from the chief of the classical gods. Much in Moby-Dick rises to this level of eloquence, and no other work in American literature surpasses it in this respect. And powerful as such a passage is, it would be less so had we not come to trust the narrator’s good sense as he earlier made light of the whale’s anatomy even as he is impressed by it. We can more easily believe him when he is in deadly earnest because he is not always so.

Symbolism
    This passage and many others like it push toward possible meanings, and when Sophia Hawthorne wrote that the Spirit Spout seemed to have a significance beyond itself, she was pointing to a literary cast of mind that Melville shared with her husband. Melville’s reply mentions that he had been vaguely aware that there might be “allegorical constructions” in the book, but allegory is not a term that properly applies to it. Here, and often in Hawthorne’s work, people and events take on a symbolic charge, but symbolism begins to approach allegory only when, on the level of ideas, the suggested meanings begin to be as coherent among themselves as are the things, people, and events in the basic story line.
    Earlier in the century Edgar Allan Poe had argued that allegory was no longer an appropriate genre for the modern writer, and while he did not elaborate, it is because allegory works best when it refers to a rich, inherited system of thought widely believed in the general culture. When, in the immensely popular Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), John Bunyan struck a note by describing the Slough of Despond or the Delectable Mountains, the Hebraic-Christian tradition rang like a bell to thicken the resonance of the image. Strong allegory is handmaiden to established order and belief, and in Melville’s more secular time that tradition was not available in the same measure, nor was Melville a comfortable believer.
    Melville was drawn to Hawthorne’s work for a number of reasons, and while concern for the darker shades of human nature