Analysis of Major Characters
Ishmael
Despite his centrality to the story, Ishmael doesn't reveal
much about himself to the reader. We know that he has gone to sea
out of some deep spiritual malaise and that shipping aboard a whaler
is his version of committing suicide—he believes that men aboard
a whaling ship are lost to the world. It is apparent from Ishmael's
frequent digressions on a wide range of subjects—from art, geology,
and anatomy to legal codes and literature—that he is intelligent
and well educated, yet he claims that a whaling ship has been “[his]
Yale College and [his] Harvard.” He seems to be a self-taught
Renaissance man, good at everything but committed to nothing. Given
the mythic, romantic aspects of Moby-Dick, it is
perhaps fitting that its narrator should be an enigma: not everything
in a story so dependent on fate and the seemingly supernatural needs
to make perfect sense.
Additionally, Ishmael represents the fundamental contradiction between
the story of Moby-Dick and its setting. Melville
has created a profound and philosophically complicated tale and
set it in a world of largely uneducated working-class men; Ishmael,
thus, seems less a real character than an instrument of the author.
No one else aboard the Pequod possesses the proper
combination of intellect and experience to tell this story. Indeed,
at times even Ishmael fails Melville's purposes, and he disappears
from the story for long stretches, replaced by dramatic dialogues
and soliloquies from Ahab and other characters.
Ahab
Ahab, the Pequod's obsessed captain,
represents both an ancient and a quintessentially modern type of
hero. Like the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, Ahab suffers
from a single fatal flaw, one he shares with such legendary characters
as Oedipus and Faust. His tremendous overconfidence, or hubris,
leads him to defy common sense and believe that, like a god, he
can enact his will and remain immune to the forces of nature. He
considers Moby Dick the embodiment of evil in the world, and he
pursues the White Whale monomaniacally because he believes it his
inescapable fate to destroy this evil. According to the critic M.
H. Abrams, such a tragic hero “moves us to pity because, since he
is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves;
but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities
of error in our own lesser and fallible selves.”
Unlike the heroes of older tragic works, however, Ahab
suffers from a fatal flaw that is not necessarily inborn but instead
stems from damage, in his case both psychological and physical,
inflicted by life in a harsh world. He is as much a victim as he
is an aggressor, and the symbolic opposition that he constructs
between himself and Moby Dick propels him toward what he considers
a destined end.
Moby Dick
In a sense, Moby Dick is not a character, as the reader
has no access to the White Whale's thoughts, feelings, or intentions.
Instead, Moby Dick is an impersonal force, one that many critics
have interpreted as an allegorical representation of God, an inscrutable
and all-powerful being that humankind can neither understand nor defy.
Moby Dick thwarts free will and cannot be defeated, only accommodated
or avoided. Ishmael tries a plethora of approaches to describe whales
in general, but none proves adequate. Indeed, as Ishmael points
out, the majority of a whale is hidden from view at all times. In
this way, a whale mirrors its environment. Like the whale, only
the surface of the ocean is available for human observation and interpretation,
while its depths conceal unknown and unknowable truths. Furthermore,
even when Ishmael does get his hands on a “whole” whale, he is unable
to determine which part—the skeleton, the head, the skin—offers
the best understanding of the whole living, breathing creature;
he cannot localize the essence of the whale. This conundrum can
be read as a metaphor for the human relationship with the Christian
God (or any other god, for that matter): God is unknowable and cannot
be pinned down.
Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask
The Pequod's three mates are used primarily
to provide philosophical contrasts with Ahab. Starbuck, the first
mate, is a religious man. Sober and conservative, he relies on his
Christian faith to determine his actions and interpretations of
events. Stubb, the second mate, is jolly and cool in moments of
crisis. He has worked in the dangerous occupation of whaling for
so long that the possibility of death has ceased to concern him.
A fatalist, he believes that things happen as they are meant to
and that there is little that he can do about it. Flask simply enjoys
the thrill of the hunt and takes pride in killing whales. He doesn't
stop to consider consequences at all and is “utterly lost . . .
to all sense of reverence” for the whale. All three of these perspectives
are used to accentuate Ahab's monomania. Ahab reads his experiences
as the result of a conspiracy against him by some larger force.
Unlike Flask, he thinks and interprets. Unlike Stubb, he believes
that he can alter his world. Unlike Starbuck, he places himself
rather than some external set of principles at the center of the cosmic
order that he discerns.
