Melville and the Problem of Evil 93
whaling voyage. After they have had several encounters with
whales, Captain Ahab dramatically announces to the crew
the real purpose of the cruise: his sole thought is to revenge
himself upon Moby Dick, a great white whale of legendary
size and ferocity that has on an earlier voyage bitten off one
of the captain’s legs. After rounding the Horn and meeting
many terrors and wonders of the sea, they at last engage the
white whale in a terrific three day fight, which results in the
destruction of the ship and the death of Captain Ahab and all
of the crew except Ishmael, who escapes by chance.
Now if this were the whole book, Moby Dick would be only
a somewhat more exciting Two Years before the Mast. What is
the difference between these two books? The difference, I
believe, lies in the different purposes of Dana and Melville,
more specifically in Melville’s concern with the problem of
evil.
For the great white whale is not just a whale; he is also a
symbol. This sea voyage is not just a physical adventure;
growing out of the physical but vividly welded to it is an
intellectual adventure even more vast than the sea, the
ship, and the whale. The symbolic method for which Melville
had been fumbling in Mardi, his last serious book, is achieved
in Moby Dick. Captain Ahab “at last,” says Melville
came to identify with him [Moby Dick], not only all his bodily
woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The
White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarna-
tion of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from
the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians
ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of
the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall
down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its
idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all muti-
lated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all
that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all