Ahab Geek Out, part one

I am among the minority.  I think Ishmael is the main character in Moby-Dick.  Ahab is the hero.  Ahab is the most interesting character.  Ahab drives the plot.  Ishmael, though, is the story teller and the entire story showcase, in a way oddly understated, his growth and his SUCCESSFUL quest.  My sense is that he, after not doing so for two novels, followed the primary rule of story telling: If you write a first person narrative, don't make yourself the main character--especially if it's an adventure novel.

Nonetheless, due to the extraordinary empathy and skill of Melville's speaker, we get great insight into Ahab.  We see (because Melville through Ishmael breaks a LOT of secondary and tertiary rules) Ahab as what he is: a truly American tragic hero.

We started seeing that last week with that passage on page 73.  We conclude, though Ishmael, writing about his adventure after it has happened, never NAMES his Quaker, that Ahab is an amazing man: reared Quaker, grown into a man at sea, seeing oddities which would baffle any landlocked person, and born with greatness of heart and mind.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald quipped: give me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.

The character was named a few pages back as Ishmael tries to talk his way on board the Pequod.  Captain Peleg counters one of the items on his resume', a desire to know what whaling is, with this:

Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?

I have asked you, in the organizer, to muse on the power of that line.  Ahab is here describe not as a whaler, as a whale ship captain, as a guy who kills whales, as a dude who participates in the whaling industry but as the physical embodiment of whaling.  It would be as if a young person came to Mr. Roner begging for a job and said, "I want to know what teaching is!" only to have Mr. Roner say, "Go take a look at Waterhouse."  (Which, of course, would never happen.  We have a much more formal job application process.)

The characterization gets thicker as the chapter ends.  It dawns on Ishmael that he's signed the next three to five years of his life away and not met his boss--Ahab.  He asks to meet him and gets two pages of seemingly self-contradictory (albeit beautiful and compelling) prose.  Ahab isn't sick and isn't well.  Ahab is an ungodly, godlike man.  (That one is confusing only until you realize the "godly" and "godlike" are two adjectives which cover very little of the same ground.) 

Just enjoy the pages, lots of great lines, but let me bring up one very important line:

No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities.

Ahab lost his leg, went a little crazy, seems moody, seems mentally ill--but he has a wife and a small child.  He has his "humanities."

You can define "humanities" any way you wish, but I like to define it here as "things which make and keep us human."  In this time of contagion, we may be seeing more clearly than ever what it is that keeps us human as we are deprived of many of these things and others are accented: the company of others, maintaining social relations, knowing right from wrong, thinking and acting rationally, seeking pleasure. 

You can read the novel as Ahab's slowly losing these things.

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