Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
The Pequod
Named after a Native American tribe in Massachusetts that
did not long survive the arrival of white men and thus memorializing
an extinction, the Pequod is a symbol of doom.
It is painted a gloomy black and covered in whale teeth and bones,
literally bristling with the mementos of violent death. It is, in
fact, marked for death. Adorned like a primitive coffin, the Pequod becomes
one.
Moby Dick
Moby Dick possesses various symbolic meanings for various
individuals. To the Pequod’s crew, the legendary
White Whale is a concept onto which they can displace their anxieties
about their dangerous and often very frightening jobs. Because they
have no delusions about Moby Dick acting malevolently toward men
or literally embodying evil, tales about the whale allow them to
confront their fear, manage it, and continue to function. Ahab,
on the other hand, believes that Moby Dick is a manifestation of
all that is wrong with the world, and he feels that it is his destiny
to eradicate this symbolic evil.
Moby Dick also bears out interpretations not tied down
to specific characters. In its inscrutable silence and mysterious
habits, for example, the White Whale can be read as an allegorical
representation of an unknowable God. As a profitable commodity,
it fits into the scheme of white economic expansion and exploitation
in the nineteenth century. As a part of the natural world, it represents
the destruction of the environment by such hubristic expansion.
Queequeg’s Coffin
Queequeg’s coffin alternately symbolizes life and death.
Queequeg has it built when he is seriously ill, but when he recovers,
it becomes a chest to hold his belongings and an emblem of his will
to live. He perpetuates the knowledge tattooed on his body by carving
it onto the coffin’s lid. The coffin further comes to symbolize
life, in a morbid way, when it replaces the Pequod’s
life buoy. When the Pequod sinks, the coffin becomes
Ishmael’s buoy, saving not only his life but the life of the narrative
that he will pass on.
