The book of Herman Melville “Moby Dick” attracted much attention and caused much debate at the time it was published because of its symbolism and multi-layer meaning the author attributes to plain speculations over the mammals called whales. It is known from the biography of Melville that he used to work on the ship hunting whales, in general having a rich travel history that he shared with the reader in the majority of his books.
However, nobody will disagree with the fact that Herman Melville’s masterpiece “Moby Dick” goes much farther the simple anthology and classification of whales. It is a deep social, psychological and philosophical work raising questions of the place of a person in the society, the human future, ethics and morality – all these topics are closely tied into the integral narrative that fascinates with the depth of judgment and precision of observations.
Moby Dick, the huge whale who has become an obsession of Ahab, the captain of the ship Ishmael joined, who had been crippled by Moby-Dick, the largest, the most furious and dangerous whale in the whole North Sea. Moby-Dick was invulnerable, it managed to escape from the most skilled hunters and he brought only grief to them, ruining their ships and killing many people. Ahab survived in such an encounter but he could not put up with the result of the fight, so he began his insane pursuit of Moby-Dick to get a chance for revenge.
The author, describing whales and hunting on whales, all methods of dealing with meat and processing the dead bodies of whales after hunting still depicts whales not only as objects for hunting, though he is, in the face of the main character, one of hunters in the course of the narrative – he shows the horror of hunters caught by the power of the huge, angry creature; he explains all hardships of hunting and the victims, the sacrifice sailors have to make during the hunting. At the same time the author admires whales as beautiful, powerful mammals that reign the sea and honor the sailors with their appearance, even for being then pursued.
Moby-Dick’s figure is highly symbolic in the book – first of all, it is necessary to mention that he is a distinguished whale that cannot be mixed with any other. He is white and he has particular appearance; together with this, he is the most furious and dangerous whale, this is why sailors are afraid of him and try not to deal with him. His emergence is like an omen for sailors, so it is possible to say that he symbolizes fate for sailors – the fight they know that will never win.
One more element necessary to be considered is the ship the described crew travels on – Pequod. From the very beginning of the narrative it is clear that the pursuit they undertake is doomed to failure: the ship’s name is taken from the name of an obsolete tribe. It symbolizes some fate – these people’s fate is already decided before they start off for their purpose. All members of the crew are representatives of different nations, social backgrounds, histories and characters, so they symbolize the whole world miniaturized in one place. Their relations, the way they communicate and make decisions have a deep social meaning the author intended to fill his book with.
It is their wish to fight Moby-Dick that becomes the main metaphor – Moby-Dick is destiny, or fortune, which people cannot master and to which they have to silently submit. The way Pequod’s crew try to resist the natural flow of things becomes their fatal mistake and the admiration mixed with horror lead to defeat and realization that Moby-Dick is not a creature; it is a unique phenomenon beyond human understanding.
However, the realization comes to the crew’s mind too late, so the sublime they admire and hate at the same time brings their fight to an end. The ending of the book contains another symbol that may throw some light on the figure of Moby-Dick:
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan (Melville 428).
Moby Dick was unlike anyone and anything else in the world, he was the face of destiny, and the people who took their chance to fight the sublime were doomed to failure, they were left with nothing. This is what the author emphasizes with the last word ‘orphan’ – people who fought the superpower and lost remain with nothing.