June 25, 2019 - Chapter Forty-one


Sometimes in a novel there comes a chapter that shares its name with the novel itself, and we are often led to consider that this chapter must have great importance. Chapter 41 is this chapter in Moby Dick, and as such, it does not disappoint. Here, we get the back story of the white whale, including Ahab’s previous encounter with it and the monomania that has plagued him ever since.

The chapter also lends itself to considering why Melville gave the whale the name that he did. It seems that the author was inspired by an article published in Knickerbocker magazine in 1839. In this article, the whale is called Mocha Dick – mocha for the name of an island near where it was seen; and dick as in “Any Tom, Dick, or Harry.” Smithsonian magazine ran a feature a few years ago on the topic.

Finally, near the end of the chapter, Ishmael offers us an observation on the subjective nature of the whale’s meaning, to be picked up in the next chapter: “what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life.”

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