Summer of Dick

Perhaps coincidentally (although perhaps not), it occurred to me before reading this chapter that we hadn’t actually had any whaling scenes yet. Luckily, this chapter delivers, since it depicts Ahab coming the conclusion (and our narrator essentially telling us) that the sailors will need to earn money, beyond just hunting Moby Dick to satisfy Ahab’s monomania. As a result, he tells the mast-heads to keep an eye out for any whale they see – even dolphins. “This vigilance was not long without reward,” the narrator says. This is not exactly subtle narration, but we are more than 200 pages into the novel at this point, and we have yet to encounter an actual whale, which is really saying something. Long before I ever read this novel, I can recall a character on the TV show M*A*S*H referring to the novel as a “great adventure” in giving the book to a young soldier. How well or poorly the novel delivers on that sales line is debatable, but I can’t imagine any GI in the Korean War recei...

Once again, a chapter of this novel offers a challenge in terms of narratology. Here, in a chapter in which the narrator seeks to assure the reader that the depictions of sperm whales are realistic, we are told of several documented cases of whales being repeatedly encountered by the same crews, as well as ships being destroyed by same. In the case, the narrator cites at length Langsdorff’s Voyages , an early 19th century travelogue. The quoted passage mentions a Captain D’Wolf. Then, we get this: “I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word.” Apparently, our narrator is Melville himself, since D’Wolf was in fact married to Melville’s paternal aunt. I’m reminded in this case of one of those moments in Slaughterhouse-Five in which Vonnegut emerges from an otherwise third-person narration to identify himself as a former POW. It’s jarring there, and it is here as well.

These two relatively short chapters have one curiosity each that I’d like to comment on here. In the first, the word “Cholo” is used by the narrator. As any fan of Al Madrigal can tell you, a “cholo” is a Mexican-American of a particular vintage, although the term is probably being used more broadly by Melville in the 1840s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the appearance of the word in Moby Dick is among the first appearances of the word in English. In the second chapter, we have a footnote on a paragraph about sperm whale migration, telling us, “Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular…” This is a curious construction. This note is presumably by a different narrator than the narration of the chapter. Is the narrator of the chapter Ishmael? Probably not, since it details the actions of Ahab while alone. Is the writer of the footnote Ishmael? That seems more possible but leaves open the question of who is narrating the ch...

In the remainder of “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael attempts to prove to his reader that there is an inherent terror in whiteness. He offers the examples of white waves foretelling disaster for sailors and the snow caps of the Andes mountains, and then states, “But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.” The true piece de resistance is the final line of the chapter, however: “And of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol.” But there have been so many things enumerated in this fairly lengthy chapter. And indeed, there is the point. If the whale and its whiteness both are things associated with radical subjectivity, then they can mean multiple things at the same time to multiple beholders. To Ahab, Moby Dick has one meaning; to any one of his crewman, Moby Dick might mean something other. To Ishmael, the whale’s whiteness is significant; to others, it might...

This chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” is one that receives a large proportion of critical attention, particularly regarding the matter of radical subjectivity and the role it plays in the novel. After meditating for a bit on the positive connotations of whiteness, Ishmael turns to the negative, offering two notable examples: “Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?” ` Among the more curious aspects of the chapter is the lengthy footnote on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ( which can be read here ). Wondering how a white bird could betoken such evil as Coleridge depicts in the poem, Melville offers a truly Wallace-esque footnote on the topic. A final point before continuing to the subjectivity of whiteness: Ishmael asks us to consider albino animals and their terrible appearance: “this mere aspect of all-pervading whitenes...

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 ...

This is another dramatic chapter, like the preceding ones, except now it is multiple characters rather than soliloquies. The action of the chapter concerns first some dancing among the crew on the ship’s deck, after which the wind kicks up, and the men disperse to prepare the ship for a storm. Finally, there are no main characters in the chapter – no Ahab, no Ishmael, no Queequeg, and none of the mates. The sole conflict in the chapter is between Tashtego, another of the harpooners, and a Spanish sailor. (The chapter has sailors from several nations – which does raise the question of why none of them speaks with an accent.) The conflict is racial in origin, although the insult to which Tashtego rises gave me a laugh: “Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.” The absurdity of the last line kills me.