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

(p. 398). The tattooing on Queequeg’s body holds
    a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!” (p. 554).
    In a world where much is mysterious and experience evokes contrasting emotions, visions of good and evil both become dangerous when the focus on one obscures the other: The inattentive optimist will fall to his death (p. 198) and the obsessed contemplator of evil may well bring that about (p. 492). Nature is both our mother and our murderer: “When beholding that tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it” (p. 564). White is the symbol of innocence but is also “the colorless, all-color of atheism” (p. 238). A man cannot be fully independent, nor should his identity be submerged in the crowd (p. 462). The only certainty is that there is unending change, and the mind can only ask, “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” (p. 565). There is none in Moby-Dick , nor anywhere else in Melville.
    No other American work approaches Melville’s ability here to alternate convincingly between complementary states, or even radical opposites, evoked with such imaginative force and conviction that we are for a time swept along in a contemplation of each possibility alone, or of a mixture so intertwined that the knot is not to be undone. Ahab is an arrogant, dictatorial, and insane figure who leads his world to destruction, yet Melville makes us think of him not simply as a madman, but as a great man gone mad.
    There are similarities here to the poet John Keats’s praise of Shakespeare as one who “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 28, 1817). By this criterion, Moby-Dick is the great masterpiece of our literature, but with a large difference: Shakespeare was born into this condition, so to speak, while the narrator of Moby-Dick comes to it after arduous but failed attempts to resolve the mysteries. The imaginative calm to which Keats is pointing is, for the novel’s voice, a hard-won condition that in Melville’s career returns only intermittently after this work.
    In the later novels, Melville colors man’s problems more darkly, the subtitle of Pierre, or the Ambiguities signaling the shift, and in The Confidence-Man , life becomes a puzzle to be parsed. Only in the great stories “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd do the dramatizations of ambiguity return with the balance of Moby-Dick , and by that time the humor is gone and the tone is somber. But in Moby-Dick , he portrays a world where good nature, intelligence, and good humor throw a light on experience that is both interesting and entertaining. Despite the looming disaster, the novel is in many ways a happy book because of the narrator’s infectious pleasure in telling the tale.
    Melville’s importance in American literature is now so great that it is hard to realize that by the early decades of the twentieth century only a small group of devoted readers considered Moby-Dick the major work we now hold it to be. Though never entirely neglected, Melville had become a special interest rather than the widely read author he is today. His last novel, The Confidence-Man , had appeared in 1857; by then he had pretty much written himself out as an