Ishmael oscillates. Moby-Dick is a novel built around a version of religious experience that can touch extremes without either embracing or rejecting them. Throughout his greatest novel, Melville allows his narrator to touch upon questions of faith and doubt, free will and determinism, monotheism and polytheism, and indeed an enormous range of human religious beliefs, traditions, and practices without either committing to one or condemning the others. Even the tone of these oscillations is elusive: When is Ishmael (and beyond him, Melville himself) in earnest? When is he pulling our leg? What does all this earnestness and levity regarding sacred matters mean? The questions remain unresolved, although attempts to provide resolution have been plentiful. The following pages provide a map to the various ways in which religion operates in this richly ambivalent novel.

Ishmael’s Introductions

The character whom we meet as the narrator in the opening sentence of “Loomings” is a personified riddle. As has been frequently noted, “Call me Ishmael” is not a statement of his name, but a command: we have a character in the first line who is both revealing himself and concealing himself using a name derived from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In its biblical resonances, his name suggests someone who is both of noble lineage and an outcast from his own family: the Ishmael that readers of the Bible meet in Genesis is the son of Abraham, the central figure in the history of the monotheistic religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but he is also the son who is driven out with his mother, Hagar, when the preferred son, Isaac, is born. In a further twist, while Ishmael is the paradigmatic outsider in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that Melville grew up reading and hearing interpreted from the pulpit, he is a revered prophet and a true insider in the Islamic faith, of which Melville also had knowledge. Throughout the novel, Ishmael guides Melville’s readers through an intricate series of allusions to what Melville’s contemporary Henry David Thoreau called “the bibles of mankind” (76), scriptures both within and beyond the Protestant tradition, in which Melville was brought up. From the early days of Melville scholarship, Melville’s use of biblical models within the Hebrew and Christian traditions has been acknowledged (especially in Nathalia Wright’s Melville’s Use of the Bible [1947] and Lawrance Thompson’s Melville’s Quarrel with God [1952]), with increasing attention appearing recently in the work of Ilana Pardes, Jonathan A. Cook, and Zachary Hutchins. The scriptures of the great religious traditions of Asia and North Africa have likewise been recognized as influences on Moby-Dick by Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, H. Bruce Franklin, and H. B. Kulkarni in the 1960s, as well as through more recent work by Arthur Versluis and Timothy Marr.

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament

The Hebrew Scriptures, which constitute the Bible for Judaism and the Old Testament for Christianity, are abundantly present in Moby-Dick, most notably through the figures of Job and Jonah, as well as through Ishmael himself. Melville devotes several chapters to a consideration of Jonah in Moby-Dick, most notably Father Mapple’s sermon, but also to satirical asides on the historicity of the biblical book of Jonah. In Father Mapple’s sermon, Jonah is, of course, central: Father Mapple inserts a young nineteenth-century sailor, who, not unlike Ishmael, is fleeing from something on land, into the story of Jonah’s disobedience, punishment, and eventual submission to God. Mapple is likely based on two main figures: Enoch Mudge, the minister at the Seaman’s Bethel in New Bedford, and Edward Taylor, a minister who was extremely popular with sailors in New England, and was known popularly as Father Taylor. Mapple’s use of homely examples drawn from the lives of sailors themselves has been a central feature that leads scholars to identify him with Taylor. In his sermon, Mapple provides a “two-stranded lesson” (the metaphor is drawn from the ropes that made up an important element within sailors’ working lives), emphasizing the necessity of submission to God and of the minister’s uncompromising devotion to his vocation. As Dawn Coleman has noted, Mapple’s sermon draws on one of the most popular literary genres in nineteenth-century America by virtue of being a sermon, and Mapple exploits sermonic tropes, like a rousing peroration, storytelling, and intense emotional rhetoric (Coleman 129–55).

From the initial description of Jonah as a type of the nineteenth-century American who runs off to sea, Mapple moves through a dazzling series of allusions and rhetorical modes in order to communicate his “two-stranded lesson” through the sermon. In the concluding paragraphs of his sermon, Mapple’s eloquence reaches a crescendo when he calls for absolute obedience to God, paired with what might seem like a recklessly antinomian attitude toward human authority:

In a passage like this, Melville shows that the sublime rebelliousness of Captain Ahab is intimately connected to the Protestant religious culture from which he springs: the orthodox Mapple and the heterodox Ahab can sound surprisingly similar.

The later references to Jonah in the novel cast Father Mapple’s verbal pyrotechnics in an ironic light: Ishmael refers wryly to the physical impossibilities in the story, suggesting a series of increasingly absurd solutions to the problems with the plausibility of the Jonah story as science or history. Perhaps, Ishmael suggests, the whale that swallowed Jonah has managed to traverse the southern cape of Africa, thus providing an instance of the extremes to which Christian apologetics could go in resolving apparent contradictions (Melville 328).

Jonah’s counterpart as a central figure throughout Moby-Dick is Job. Ahab and his crew chase a “Job’s whale with curses” around the world. In Inscrutable Malice (2012), Jonathan A. Cook has discussed, at length, the role of theodicy, or the problem of positing a just God in the face of evil, throughout the novel in relation to Job, and Ilana Pardes’ Melville’s Bibles (2008) also begins with a consideration of the role of the biblical book of Job in the background of Moby-Dick. The very fact that Melville uses the term “leviathan,” which is drawn from the book of Job, so frequently to describe the whale throughout the novel is indicative of the degree to which the biblical narrative of suffering and doubt is woven into Melville’s novel.

The other major character from the Hebrew Bible who plays a major role in the novel is Ahab, and he is paired tellingly with a minor, but important figure, Elijah. As Ishmael and Queequeg prepare to board the Pequod, they are confronted by a man who appears to be mad, but whose words forecast much of what is to happen in the novel. Warning them against shipping with Pequod, Elijah, the apparent madman, asks whether in Ishmael and Queequeg’s contract to sail aboard the Pequod there is “anything down there about your souls?” (98) and reveals Captain Ahab’s blasphemous history, hinting that by shipping with him, Ishmael and Queequg have made a deal with the devil. The fact that the warning comes from “Elijah” calls attention, of course, to Captain Ahab’s biblical name, as King Ahab, in the Bible, is Elijah’s great antagonist. Ahab is condemned in the Bible for his compromises with the idolatry of Canaanite religious traditions, and Ahab in Moby-Dick has likewise formed alliances with religious traditions outside of his own Quaker heritage, as becomes apparent once the ship has left harbor and his shadow crew is revealed (Melville 213).

The centrality of the Hebrew Scriptures, or the Old Testament as they are known within various Christian traditions, has been acknowledged in Moby-Dick almost from the start. Melville makes nearly as extensive use of the Christian New Testament, however, in a range of instances throughout Moby-Dick. In “Loomings,” the chapter that sets the tone for all that is to follow, Ishmael asks “What of it, if some old hunks of a sea captain order me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?” (Melville 23). As I have discussed elsewhere, Melville’s markings in his own copy of The New Testament and Psalms are highly suggestive relative to Ishmael’s reference here to the “scales of the New Testament.” The indignities to which Ishmael ought logically to submit himself, in order to be obedient to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament, far surpass those that he experiences as a sailor before the mast. When Ishmael worships Queequeg’s idol Yojo, he likewise employs the ethics of the New Testament against the doctrinal adherents of the religion drawn from the New Testament, arguing that “Now Queequeg is my fellow. What do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator” (Melville 63). Ishmael thus adroitly turns the New Testament’s status as an ethical document against its status as an expression of dogma. Father Mapple’s sermon brings together the language of the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament when he declaims against all those who lack the courage of their convictions: “Woe to him whom this world turns from his gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil on the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!” (59). The role of the New Testament in Moby-Dick is often, ironically, to provide a countertext to Christian orthodoxy and American cultural norms, and one of the things that Melville seems to find attractive about the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is their tendency to foster self-criticism within the very institutions associated with them.

A figure drawn from the New Testament who plays a parallel role to that of Elijah, Job, Jonah, and Ishmael in the novel is the archangel Gabriel, who appears in the form of another madman. Gabriel is a member of a marginal religious minority within Protestantism, the Shakers, about whom Melville read in several books that he owned: A Summary View of the Millennial Church and A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts. Like Elijah, Gabriel is mad, but also like Elijah, Gabriel speaks a kind of truth that his listeners are unprepared to accept. His warning to Ahab, while framed in the service of a weirdly idiosyncratic variation upon Shaker doctrine, is also to the point: “beware of the blasphemer’s end”—an end that, however mad Gabriel may be, still awaits Captain Ahab (286).

Alternative Religious Traditions

Melville is not limited by the predominantly Christian, Protestant culture of his time and place in Moby-Dick. Throughout the chapters on whaling, Melville invokes Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, indigenous traditions in the Pacific Islands, and the varieties of skepticism that were developing out of modern historical study and science. This appears even in the “Extracts” that begin Moby-Dick. The quotations catalogued draw heavily upon the Bible and other biblically-oriented works, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, but they also draw upon the natural sciences and upon the workaday business of whaling. If the readers of Moby-Dick encounter the Puritans in the form of a reference to The New England Primer, they likewise encounter references to the young Charles Darwin and to such quotidian matters as the size of a whale’s liver. The material and spiritual worlds of Moby-Dick are in almost constant dialogue: when Ishmael, Ahab, Father Mapple, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Fleece, and Pip reflect on theological and ethical questions, they always do so in relation to the physicality of the ocean, the whale’s body, and the human body.

Similarly, Hinduism, like Judaism and Christianity, comes to the fore in Melville’s considerations of whales and whaling. After invoking Jonah from the Bible and Perseus from classical mythology, Ishmael asserts that whaling’s noble lineage includes actual deities by way of Hinduism in that Vishnu can be claimed as a “whaleman,” a status that relies on a bit of a pun: he was not a hunter of whales, but rather “incarnate in a whale” (326). One reading of Melville’s use of Hinduism in Moby-Dick has been to assume that it is largely satirical or comedic; H. Bruce Franklin made this case in The Wake of the Gods on the way to his groundbreaking exploration of Egyptology in Moby-Dick, and this has often operated as a default assumption for many scholars. However, other critics, notably H. B. Kulkarni, have argued that Hinduism is, in fact, central, not peripheral to Moby-Dick. For Kulkarni, the shifting perspectives and the way conflicting points of view coexist in the novel both suggest a kind of pluralism characteristic of Hinduism, concluding that the message of Moby-Dick is more Hindu than Christian.

Catholicism and Islam often appear side by side, for example, in the consideration of Jonah’s historicity, where both faiths are associated with religious legends that Melville’s Protestant contemporaries declined to believe. In the case of Islam, Ishmael invokes Ottoman Turkey, a major world power in his day, in chapter eighty-three, “Jonah Historically Regarded,” to suggest the persistence of inherited religious beliefs across religious traditions. As discussed below, Ishmael invokes Islam in his description of Queequeg’s “Ramadan.” Moreover, Ishmael’s own name, as Timothy Marr has pointed out, gains added resonances through its connections with Islam, in that the scriptural Ishmael is far more central in Muslim sacred history than in Jewish or Christian traditions (Marr 219–61).

Perhaps the most memorable invocations of Catholicism in Moby-Dick appear in a curiously inverted series of liturgical moments: in the quarter-deck scene, Captain Ahab, himself a Quaker, invokes the Catholic liturgy of Holy Thursday: “when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer” (161), echoing Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet. He does this as part of a larger mock liturgy in which the pagan harpooneers become communicants in his own religion of revenge, a parodic inversion of Christian communion and of New Testament ethical teachings on forgiveness and humility. In a later chapter, “The Cassock,” Catholicism is invoked in a still more unlikely context. The chapter is devoted, somewhat coyly, to a discussion of the penis of the whale (an “unaccountable cone—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg” [371]), and the “cassock” of the title ends up being the skin of the whale’s penis, which is worn by the mincer in a manner reminiscent of liturgical vestments. Ishmael plays with traditional Protestant criticisms of the Catholic hierarchy in this chapter, but at the same time, he plays with Protestant Biblicism, pointing out not only the correspondence of the skin of the whale’s penis to vestments, but also to the fact that the thin slices of blubber that the mincer is intent on producing are referred to as “bible leaves,” thus also parodying the most sacred objects for a Protestant devoted to the Bible. In both cases, the uncomfortable resemblance between sacred and profane objects contributes to the humorous doubleness with which Ishmael regards the scene.

An aspect of the novel that calls to mind the theological debates between Catholicism and Protestantism and among Protestant denominations is the way Christian communion suffuses both Moby-Dick and the letters that Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne during its composition. In the quarter-deck scene, Captain Ahab employs the forms of the Catholic mass in order to create a sense of awe in the sailors, whom he seeks to control. After he finished composing Moby-Dick, Melville wrote to Hawthorne, expressing his feelings about both their relationship and his completion of the novel and musing, in a passage charged with both theological and erotic intensity: “Whence come you Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips, lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and we are its pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling” (Correspondence 212). Melville fuses the spiritual and the sensual in this passage in a truly sacramental manner; as this passage illustrates, his use of communion as a figure throughout his text is thus an expression of a universal longing for both bodily and spiritual connection.

A less widely familiar faith than the others discussed here, Zoroastrianism, provides an especially unexpected backdrop for the interplay of faith, doubt, and uncertainty in Moby-Dick. In Ahab’s shadow crew aboard the Pequod, Fedallah is the leader, and Fedallah is defined as an Indian Parsee—a Zoroastrian of Persian descent. Fedallah is among the most mysterious characters in the entire novel, and in a novel shaped by questions about the meaning of human suffering and the problem of evil, he presents a set of alternatives to Christian answers to these very questions. Zoroastrianism is a dualist faith, and Fedallah’s presence calls attention to the idea that good and evil are not independent of each other: he is at once a demonic figure, associated by Ishmael with the story that “though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, engaged in mundane amours” (Melville 213), and the one truly reliable prophet who can reveal Ahab’s destined end, when he reveals that to the captain that “[h]emp only can kill thee” (437). Ahab internalizes elements of Zoroastrianism himself when he addresses the “clear spirit of fire” in “The Candles.”

Melville’s consideration of indigenous traditions in Moby-Dick plays off his consideration of major world religions. Queequeg, just as much as Ishmael, is a seeker who questions his inherited certitudes, but who also digs in his heels when it comes to certain practices he values. In Melville’s mini-biography of Queequeg, we see that Queequeg is a religious seeker who questions his own upbringing, but also finds reasons to doubt in the Christianity he encounters in his travels. Queequeg initially seeks out Christian missionaries to inquire about the faith they promote, but on seeing the comparative ethical performance of Christians and adherents of his own inherited religious traditions, concludes that “it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan” (Melville 68). Queequeg’s decision here to retain the faith of his youth follows the model of the young Christian with an inclination toward free thought who dabbles in the work of skeptics, like Thomas Paine, only to return to the faith of his youth. This pattern is a familiar one from nineteenth-century didactic religious literature. Melville’s treatment of it is an inversion of the typical pattern: for Queequeg, his flirtation with Christianity is infidelity to the beliefs of his ancestors, and his rejection of conversion is an act of filial piety.

In this regard, the fact that Queequeg is described as “George Washington cannibalistically developed” (62), a description that is often invoked as a sign of Melville’s resistance to the racialism of his time period, may also speak to Melville’s understanding and treatment of religion. Washington can stand in, not just for a kind of natural nobility, but also for the Enlightenment precepts and their adoption by generations of American statesmen. Like Washington, Queequeg is not a doctrinaire adherent of the faith of his youth; also like Washington, he holds to it loosely, recognizing that a faith that is no longer one’s exclusive belief system can still provide valuable conceptual structures. That Melville was interested in the side of the early American experience that was removed from religious orthodoxy appears in his treatment of Ethan Allen and Benjamin Franklin in Israel Potter. We might reasonably add nineteenth-century American civil religion to the list of religious impulses with which Moby-Dick interacts.

Queequeg is thus something more than a standard virtuous pagan. His faith is neither a lesser corollary to Christianity nor a preparation for Christianity destined to be superseded by the true faith, but rather a genuine alternative, one which derives its strength from Queequeg’s own moral character. Like Ishmael when he worships Yojo, Queequeg has abstracted precisely what Melville finds most attractive in the Christian gospel, not through conversion, but through the possession of a character that mirrors the virtues of Jesus in the gospels. Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship is in no small part the story of Ishmael’s gradual coming to terms with Queequeg’s religious blend of strangeness and familiarity as a fellow member of what Ishmael calls “the First Congregational Church of this whole worshipping world” (94).

A recent adaptation of Moby-Dick calls attention to this aspect of the novel beautifully. In Jake Heggie’s operatic version of Moby-Dick, the action begins on board ship, but the scene with which it begins is Ishmael’s commentary upon Queequeg’s “Ramadan,” which, in the novel, takes place on shore. Ishmael vehemently rebukes Queequeg’s “superstitious” fasting, and Queequeg resolutely ignores Ishmael’s importunities. The decision to make this scene so prominent in the most widely performed operatic adaptation of the novel has much to recommend it. In the novel, Queequeg’s Ramadan occurs before he and Ishmael ship out of New Bedford on the Pequod, with Queequeg retreating into an austere pattern of prayer and fasting that are part of his own indigenous religious traditions, but which Ishmael identifies with the Islamic fast of Ramadan, providing an opportunity for a wry commentary on the tension between religious self-denial and the pleasures of life. Reflecting on Queequeg’s “Ramadan” as an instance of religious self-denial, Ishmael argues that a great deal of religious emotion can be attributed to physiological sources: “In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea born on an undigested apple-dumpling, and since then perpetuated by the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans” (Melville 93).

In one of the more memorable philosophical reflections in the novel (one alluded to in the title of this essay), Ishmael considers the whale’s spout. Regarding the water droplets in the whale’s respiration, he exclaims:

The relationship of faith and doubt that Ishmael expresses here is beautifully ambivalent. The water droplets in the whale’s spout form a rainbow, and this rainbow becomes emblematic of the interplay of faith and doubt that characterized nineteenth-century religious life for many authors and intellectuals, as well as ordinary believers who skirted the edge of unbelief. As he has been doing throughout the novel, Ishmael establishes that his skepticism and faith are linked: he is prepared to doubt everything in his own tradition and in those of others, but he is also prepared to embrace the intuitions that are suggested by all of the traditions of faith and doubt with which he is in contact.

Ishmael’s Faith(s)

So, where do all these doubts and intuitions leave us? Is Moby-Dick an epic of faith, or an anatomy of doubt? And, for that matter, faith in whom? Doubts of what? There is an intractable quality to these questions: the more that we engage Melville’s religious thought, the more we find ourselves qualifying our assertions in order to account for subtleties that our previous statements elided. The multiple viewpoints expressed in Moby-Dick and the pre-Christian religious resonances in many passages in the novel have led some commentators, most recently and prominently including the philosophers Sean D. Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus in All Things Shining (2011), to conclude that Moby-Dick is a manifesto for polytheism, the belief in multiple, anthropocentric deities. There is a seductive quality to this sort of reading of Moby-Dick, in that Moby-Dick, as a whole, clearly subscribes to no one religious orthodoxy and is often in an antagonistic relationship with the more rigid varieties of Christian orthodoxy. It seems unfortunate, however, to assert polytheism as the religious stance for a novel that owes as much to orthodox and unorthodox varieties of monotheism—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—as it does. In a way, taking “polytheism,” or even the more capacious concept of “pluralism” as the message of Moby-Dick seems, ultimately, too narrow. Ishmael weaves in and out of various traditions, seemingly attracted to all, both the familiar and the exotic, but committed to none.

In this regard, Ishmael may bear a close resemblance to his literary creator. Five years after the publication of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville visited the man to whom he had dedicated the novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Liverpool, England. Hawthorne and Melville had taken the opportunity to catch up, and Melville, as he was wont to do, had confided in Hawthorne about his own reflections on matters of faith. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his wife Sophia describing the conversation:

The quality of ceaseless, impassioned searching that Hawthorne noted in his letter seems broadly characteristic of Moby-Dick: Melville never rests, never allows himself to be constrained by the outlines of any one mode of faith or doubt, orthodoxy or heterodoxy. T. Walter Herbert has, in an influential study entitled Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977), argued that Melville chronicled the movement from a theocentric (God-centered) to anthropocentric (human-centered) universe in Moby-Dick. This conclusion seems right, if we keep in mind that Melville never seems to commit himself to either an optimistic or pessimistic sense of what this development means, but rather narrates it with careful attention to both the gain and the loss associated with such a transition.

Perhaps we stray the least in our reading of the religious dimensions of Moby-Dick if we bear in mind two more moments of profound multi-religious reflection. In “The Try-Works,” Ishmael begins by referring to religion in ways that reflect a conventional opposition between the divine and the diabolic and does so in ways that seem to reinforce North American racial categories. The Pequod is described as a kind of floating hell, on which demonic workers enact scenes of Gothic horror. This might seem to reinforce the racist identification of people of color and non-Western cultures as being demonic, but Ishmael undermines this identification by stating that it is Ahab (the “monomaniac commander” [Melville 375]) whose soul is being mirrored. He moves on to a strikingly multi-religious reflection on the relationship between hope and pessimism. Here, as elsewhere in Moby-Dick, he finds a character from the Hebrew Bible to be especially useful: in this case, King Solomon. Solomon is a loaded figure for Melville. He represents wisdom within the Hebrew and Christian traditions, but he is also one of the figures in the Bible most associated with inter-religious contact and dialogue. Later in his career, Melville would reflect on precisely this element of Solomon’s story in “Rammon: A Fragment,” in which he considered the possibility that Solomon could have been introduced to Buddhism via the Queen of Sheba. Here as well, Solomon is being invoked as a sort of religious alternative to the Christianity of Melville’s youth. Ishmael reflects:

“Unchristian Solomon” is joined in the passage by a series of other religious dissidents from orthodoxy as understood by many American Protestants, and his pessimism is defined as “wondrous.” What Solomon’s presence suggests is a kind of philosophical equanimity that neither commits to hope nor collapses into despair, but finds ways of living with both possibilities. This equanimity is captured in the chapter’s closing image of the Catskill eagle:

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the deepest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains, so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds on the plain, even though they soar (Melville 376).

The fact that matters most about the Catskill eagle is its ability to negotiate apparent opposites effortlessly, whether depression or exaltation, intuition or doubt.

Another scene in which the inner life is invoked poetically is the abandonment of Pip at sea. Ishmael comments upon the trauma that Pip experiences: “[A]mong the joyous, ever juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of the waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad” (Melville 367). Pip’s abandonment has led him to a kind of madness that Ishmael suggests is, paradoxically, a paramount form of sanity. Because Pip has fully come to terms with his own illusions, he is no longer able to behave in a manner that his shipmates recognize as sanity, but he has achieved a kind of sanity in that he no longer shares in the general madness. For Ishmael, both “doubts of all things earthly” and “intuitions of some things heavenly” point toward the same result: the doubter and the visionary are both able to see in a manner that is independent of their prior experience. The characters who grow the most in Moby-Dick are those who, in one way or another, have their range of vision altered by the marvelous and traumatic events that they experience.

As every reader of the novel knows, Moby-Dick ends with a general catastrophe and the rescue of one survivor. The entire crew of the Pequod is drowned when Moby Dick sinks not just the lifeboats, but the ship itself, and Ahab meets his prophesied end. Ishmael alone survives, when, buoyed by Queequeg’s coffin, he emerges from the whirlpool created by the ship’s sinking. When Ishmael, as the orphaned survivor of the Pequod’s wreck, is retrieved by the Rachel, he has plumbed the depths of darkness, like the diving Catskill eagle, or like Pip abandoned at sea, and he is now ready to soar into “sunny spaces” (Melville 376) through his narration of his story, his doubts and intuitions providing the wings by which he rises.

Works Cited