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.sionate friendship and to whom the novel is dedi-cated, provided especially formative influences, as Epilogue did the tragedies of Shakespeare, particularly KingOnly Ishmael survives to tell the tale.He was someLear, Hamlet, and Macbeth.Other literary sourcesdistance from the ship when it went down, andsuch as Coleridge s Rime of the Ancient Mariner andafter being sucked down into the whirlpool of itsMilton s Paradise Lost also had discernible influ-sinking, he reemerges, holding on to the canoe-cof-ence.Owen Chase s narrative of the sinking of thefin that had originally been made for Queequeg.Essex by a whale (a narrative Melville had receivedIshmael, describing himself as an orphan, is pickedfrom Chase s own son when the two met during aup by the Rachel.gam in the Pacific) provided inspiration.Melvillealso supplemented his own knowledge of whal-CRITICAL COMMENTARYing from his time on the Acushnet through outsideOpening as it does with Extracts from a variety material, particularly Thomas Beale s Natural His-of sources, Moby-Dick draws on numerous other tory of the Sperm Whale and Etchings of a Whalingtexts throughout the novel so many, in fact, that Cruise by J.Ross Browne.in his review of the novel, Melville s friend EVERT Before considering what readers have said aboutDUYCKINCK referred to Moby-Dick as an intellec- the novel, it is instructive to note what Melville Moby-Dick; or, The Whale 151himself had to say about it.To Hawthorne in the American experience.America needed authorsNovember 1851, Melville wrote, I have written a who would carry republican progressiveness intowicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.& It is Literature, as well as into Life. Clearly, in creatinga strange feeling no hopefulness in it, no despair.Moby-Dick, Melville attempts to become such anContent that is it; and irresponsibility; but without author.licentious inclination. Just what Melville meant by Since its reevaluation by literary scholars in thecalling his book wicked may be somewhat illumi- early 20th century, Moby-Dick has become onenated by his comments in an earlier letter to Haw- of the most frequently and variously interpretedthorne, written while still at work on Moby-Dick, novels in the English language.Indeed, the ever-in which he wrote, This is the book s motto (the changing currents of literary critical approachessecret one), Ego non baptiso te in nomine but can be charted in part by the ways in which amake out the rest yourself. This motto exists in particular generation of scholars reads Moby-Dick.full in chapter 113 of Moby-Dick, in which Ahab Moby-Dick s ambiguity is one clear reason for thistempers his new-made harpoons with the blood multiplicity of approaches to the novel.Every ele-of his three non-Christian harpooners, exclaiming ment of the novel the characters and their moti- Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine vations, the incidents aboard ship, the operationsdiaboli! meaning I baptize you not in the name of the natural world and its inhabitants, includingof the Father, but in the name of the devil. Just how the white whale itself seems rich with meaningfar Melville meant the motto of this dark baptism and symbolism, yet the exact nature of that mean-to extend to the baptism of the entire novel, ing and symbolism remains (one might suspectperhaps, or even of the reader remains unclear.intentionally) obscure.In discussing Ahab s scar,What is clear, however, is the author s sense that for example, one member of the crew claims thethe core matter of Moby-Dick was both dark and mark came from an elemental strife at sea, whilemetaphysical.another swears it must be a birthmark that spansMelville s goals in Moby-Dick might also be read the full length of Ahab s body.Rather than identi-in relation to his comments about the develop- fying the correct information from among these sto-ing field of American literature in his 1850 essay ries, Ishmael adds yet another layer of possibility in HAWTHORNE AND HIS MOSSES. In it, Melville his own description, likening the scar to a mark leftpraises Hawthorne s darkness, which derives its on a tree that has been struck by lightning.In oneforce from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of sense, such ambiguity might be read as a manifesta-Innate Depravity and Original Sin. This explora- tion of that republican progressiveness to whichtion of darkness and evil, Melville argues, allows Melville presumably aspired no one meaning isHawthorne to equal Shakespeare, who, through allowed to rule over the others, and all meaningsthe darkness of his characters, craftily says, or instead coexist democratically.In many ways, thesometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to novel privileges ambiguity; those characters whobe so terrifically true, that it were all but madness understand life in only one way, or the whale infor any good man, in his own proper character, to one way, suffer for such shortsightedness
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