 
# The Illustrated Northrop Frye

by Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 1978 Albert J. Miele, Jr.

Copyright 2009 Albert J. Miele, Jr.

## Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smaswords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To Northrop Frye, my wife, Sung,

and my son, A.J.

Contents

Preface to the 2009 Edition

Chapter 1: The Dragon Quest

Chapter 2: Descent to a Lower World

Chapter 3: The Tearing Apart of "Reality"

Chapter 4: The Death Struggle

Chapter 5: Ishmael's Ascent

Notes

About the Author

About the Cover

## Preface to the 2009 Edition

I originally completed The Illustrated Northrop Frye in 1978. In 2009, I updated some of my use of language, changing, for example, the archaic use of "man" to "humanity." I also changed my references to Moby-Dick from the first (1967) to the second edition (2002) of Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford's Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick.

In examining the scholarship on Melville and Moby-Dick from 1978 to today, I have found no detailed studies anything like my own, which is a practical application of Frye's theory of archetypal criticism, as set forth mainly in Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture, to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Except for the changes just mentioned, I have decided to issue this 2009 edition of The Illustrated Northrop Frye virtually unchanged from its original form with the hope that it may contribute to whatever renaissance of Frye criticism may currently be underway or may occur in the future.

## Chapter 1: The Dragon Quest

In the terms of Northrop Frye's theory of archetypal criticism, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is an "encyclopedic romance." The closest equivalent to Frye's term "encyclopedic romance" in traditional terminology would be "epic romance." Richard Chase, in The American Novel and Its Tradition, and Edward Rosenberry, in "Moby-Dick: Epic Romance," each use this traditional term to describe Moby-Dick. "This term is perhaps the inevitable one for Melville's great book," Chase says. "But Moby-Dick is extremely impure art, it is a hybrid, one of the most audacious surely that have ever been conceived." Chase is thus dissatisfied with the adequacy of "epic romance" as a descriptive term for Moby-Dick. In a bibliographical note, Rosenberry acknowledges his debt to Frye's Anatomy of Criticism in helping him to decide to call Moby-Dick an "epic romance," the best term, in his view, for his intended "uninitiated reader." But in the same bibliographical note, Rosenberry says that the "classification of Moby-Dick as a type of prose fiction is a difficult and unresolved question." He too is dissatisfied with the term "epic romance." This study proposes to help solve this problem of classification.

Classification of Moby-Dick's form has indeed proved a dilemma for critics from the time of publication in 1851 to today. It quickly becomes apparent that the cause of the critical dilemma over this work's form is not to be found in Moby-Dick at all, but in the inadequate literary terms used to examine it—prehistoric stone tools compared with Frye's surgical clamps and scalpels. Hence one ingenious modern critic finds himself inventing his own term to describe a principle of formal symmetry in the organization of the chapters. In "'Careful Disorder': The Structure of Moby-Dick," Herbert Eldridge terms this principle "enveloping," but although his discussion is illuminating, his term is obscure. Would that Moby-Dick could be crammed into an envelope and mailed off to eternity. The critics would be all the happier. The critical dilemma Moby-Dick raises demonstrates a failure of literary criticism. Moby-Dick has been called just about everything, even "gothic novel." One eminent critic seems to suggest that the cetological material is so well written that the book might well serve as a primer for beginning students of cetology.

The major stream of criticism with which this study has to do, however, is the tradition which has attempted to relate Moby-Dick to myth. A hodge-podge of approaches greets the eye. The close relation between myth and romance form disturbed one 1851 critic immensely. He found a "great deal of myth and mystery" in Moby-Dick. He also found the result a "primitive formation of profanity and indecency." Thus he concluded his review: "The book-maker and book-publisher had better do their work with a view to the trial it must undergo at the bar of God." For this critic biblical myth is sacred literature. Hence his criticism becomes value-judgment criticism, and of the worst kind. The work's meaning and form get shoved aside, and the critic clambers up the critical platform he erects to spout off his personal religious credo. Frye hopes to eliminate such autobiographical criticism from the scholarly study of literature. Thus Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism: "Value-judgments are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value-judgments."

Frye's approach to literature is the opposite of the personally reductive. His approach is "scientific." It is one in which the connections between one fact or interpretation and another are clearly defined and related to a logical concept of literature as a whole. The characteristics of literary works, when literature becomes an object of study, are as infinite and variable as the characteristics of any object in nature. Scholarly study of literature must have its own "conceptual framework," Frye says, so that knowledge of literature will add up to a coherent whole and so that literary criticism will be a field of study all its own, and not an adjunct to other fields such as psychology, history, or philosophy.

In Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford describes Moby-Dick as "one of the first great mythologies to be created in the modern world." This remark captures the spirit of Frye's idea that myths have been transformed into romances. But, clearly, the function of romance, and of the other forms of literature, is and will continue to be different from the function of the myths of the past. The romance form will probably not gain the kind of authority once given to myths. Nor should romance become the center of a new religion, though some of the cults which have sprung up around certain writers suggest as much. The Melville cult is a good example. Literature is taking over the imaginative authority once given to myth. But it is working within the realm of authority being given by society to the idea that a truly free society is desirable and that in a truly free society the individual will be free. The myth of such freedom is the central ideal of romance and each individual work plays a part in making this myth a "reality" by offering a vision of it.

Nathalia Wright's Melville's Use of the Bible and Richard Chase's Herman Melville: A Critical Study contain excellent myth criticism on Moby-Dick. The difference between these studies and this one, however, is that Wright and Chase seek to show the direct relations between myth and Moby-Dick, while this study identifies the important mythical influences, then turns to Frye's work to see how these myths themselves figure as the archetypes behind the conventions of the literary forms. The conventions, as Frye presents them, are then sought out in Moby-Dick. This study examines the myth's relation to Moby-Dick as the myth passes through Frye's theory of criticism. Hence the myth itself is not as important as the conventions that it gives rise to.

Other valuable studies, similar to Chase's and Wright's, include H.B. Kulkarni's "Moby Dick: A Hindu Avatar," which examines Moby-Dick in terms of Hindu myth, and H. Bruce Franklin's The Wake of the Gods, a study of Moby-Dick in terms of Egyptian myth. Frye often hints at the influences of Eastern myths on Western ones, but his aim is to describe the conventions of Western literature in terms of biblical and classical myth. These studies by Franklin and Kulkarni, then, are pioneer efforts at determining more clearly what the Eastern influences are, as Jessie Weston, for instance, in From Ritual to Romance, helps to determine them when she shows that the romantic Fisher King figure and the grail cycle of romances in which he appears descend from the ancient Eastern fertility myths of Tammuz and Adonis, both "Dying and Reviving Gods," according to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye sets forth his theory of archetypal criticism as part of the "inductive leap" he makes toward establishing literary criticism as a science. For Frye the conventions of the literary forms derive from the varying ways in which the archetypes, or recurrent structural patterns, images, and symbols which form myths, are "displaced" into literary works. The term "displacement" describes the process of taking archetypes out of their mythical contexts and of placing them within narrative contexts "by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery and the like." Frye identifies four basic mythoi or pre-generic forms for all fiction. These are comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. Of course Frye also describes genres and more specific types of fiction, but this study will attempt only to show why, on the archetypal level, Moby-Dick would be classified as an "encyclopedic romance." On the generic level, Moby-Dick is, in Frye's own words, a "romance-anatomy" or a combination of specific types of prose fiction he calls the romance and the anatomy. But the task of showing how he arrives at this generic classification from the pre-generic one is the copestone for this study which shall be left to posterity.

Frye derives his four mythoi or pre-generic plot structures by studying the structure of myths. He identifies the basic communicable unit of structure in myth as the archetype. The archetype is a recurrent pattern, image, or symbol. It is an "associative cluster" or "complex variable" which acts as the underlying unit of design in myth. After identifying the archetype in myth, Frye traces its appearance throughout literature, and he discovers that it is not only the basic unit of form in myth but also the basic unit of form in all works of imaginative literature. An example of an archetype appears in the "great fish" image of the Jonah myth. This "great fish" is one form or "modulation" of a recurrent symbol which may be found all throughout myth and literature. Frye calls it the "dragon" archetype. In Frye's own words, for instance, "Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville's novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward." The dragon archetype is integral to the romance form, though it can appear less significantly in any of the other forms of literature. The quest to slay the dragon or archetypal "dragon quest" is the shaping design behind the romance form. Hence Frye identifies the archetypes in myths, but he develops his mythoi by tracing the archetypes through literature to see how they conventionally appear in stories. The key to archetypal symbolism, then, is mythology. From Frye's point of view, for the literary critic myth is not a guide to acts of popular piety, nor is it a canon for superstitious belief or doctrine. It is a potential grammar of archetypal symbolism and literary form.

Myth presents the grammar of archetypal symbolism because, like any grammar, it is a highly conventionalized form of symbolism. The central difference between myth and other forms of literature, and the reason why myth is so important for archetypal criticism, is that society gives greater authority to myth than to any other form of imaginative literature. Mythology is the imaginative center of society. It unifies a society by explaining social views on such matters as death and the afterlife, law, morality, and cosmology. Study of the structure of myths reveals the fundamental structure of all forms of imaginative literature. If works of the imagination are to be at all communicable within society, they have to communicate by using the imaginative forms the society provides, but the author need be no more conscious of using these forms than he need be conscious of using the grammar of verbal language itself. Moreover, the classification of his work is based upon the relation between his work and other works of literature, not upon the relation between the work and the author. Hence in this study of Moby-Dick, no attempt will be made to show the degree to which Melville may have been conscious of using the archetypes which are to be described as the basis of his work's form.

Biblical mythology has held the central position of imaginative authority in Western verbal culture. Clustering around this biblical center, however, is classical myth which is of a lesser authority. Classical myth has lost its position of central authority to biblical myth. It has thus become known as "fabulous" literature. Other forms of fabulous literature include folk tales, legends, and the like. But mythical and fabulous stories are identical in structure, and both are central sources of archetypal symbolism in society. Classical myth, once the center of authority in Western verbal culture, still has a profound influence on archetypal symbolism. Biblical myth, now fast losing its central position of authority, is quickly becoming fabulous literature itself. It is losing its authority to the secular scripture of romance, the most conventionalized form of literature to develop out of myth. Hence the mythological universe is presently undergoing a profound change from an imaginative vision in which God and Christ are heroes and idols of worship and in which life in a heavenly kingdom is the goal to one in which humanity is the hero and freedom humanity's goal. The entire imaginative vision of the mythological universe is shifting or being "displaced," as Frye terms the process. The function of myth in society is thus changing, too.

To define the term displacement more fully, the archetypal forms of myth and literature have to be examined more closely. Myth is the "identification of ritual and dream in which the former is seen to be the latter in movement." Ritual is a recurrent act of symbolic communication. It is impelled by desire which "is neither limited to nor satisfied by objects . . ." Ritual is a form of expressing desire; dream is the symbolic expression of desire. Common dream symbols recur in the dreams of all men, and these recurrent symbols or motifs become the social dream symbols of myth. Carl Jung claims that these common dream symbols have a physiological origin in the structure of the human brain; that they are organs of thought as integral to the structure of the mind as organs such as the heart or lungs are to the body. But this theory need neither be accepted nor rejected by the literary critic. The critic's interest is in the symbolic language itself, not in the physiological origins of this symbolism, which are out of his field of study.

Ritual and dream have an element of recurrence in them, although the element of recurrence is a stronger defining characteristic of ritual than it is of dream. Ritual imitates nature as cyclical process. It does so to give nature a human form, which is what civilization as a whole is attempting to do, as can be seen in the illustrations Frye cites of farming and architecture. Ritual and dream each also have an important element of dialectic in them. The ritual act expresses desire. It can also express the opposite of desire, repugnance. Hence there are rituals of initiation into the society and rituals of expulsion from it. The dialectical element, present in both ritual and dream, is a stronger defining characteristic of dream than it is of ritual. Dreams of wishfulfillment are in dialectical opposition to nightmares, but until these dreams are given a form of expression by being united with rituals, they are no more than the formless flow of natural symbolism through the mind. The ritual becomes, then, the dream in movement or the form of the dream. Myth is the identity of ritual and dream because myth is the social form and means of expressing them both.

The two archetypal aspects of the structure of myth are thus ritual and dream. Ritual is the "archetypal aspect of mythos" or plot; dream the "archetypal aspect of dianoia" or theme: Imaginative literature is an imitation of social acts which have analogies to the cyclical rituals presented in myths. It is also an imitation of dreams, which have analogies to the dialectical dream symbolism of myths. The two most basic structural principles for all fiction, then, are, first, the cyclical pattern of the plot and, second, the dialectical development of the theme. The two basic kinds of archetypal symbols are thus cyclical and dialectical. These symbols are taken out of their mythical contexts and placed in the contexts of the literary forms. They are "displaced" from myth into literature by means of "some form of simile." Frye identifies four basic unions of ritual and dream in mythology. Each becomes the basis for a different form of literature. These unions become the contents of the literary form, as literature develops its own ritual patterns or forms to present them. Comedy is the union of the ritual initiation with the dream of wishfulfillment in which desire is restricted to desire for initiation into a society. Romance is the union of the ritual quest with the wishfulfillment dream again, only in romance desire takes the more unlimited form of desire for rebirth into an ideal world. Tragedy unites the ritual sacrifice of a heroic individual with the self-destructive dream of omnipotence; irony unites the ritual tearing apart of the sacrificial victim with the nightmare.

In each instance, the particular mythical or archetypal form is "displaced" from myth into the analogous context of the literary form. The mythical vision of the universe is "displaced" into an analogous literary vision of it and therefore altered. Each mythos stresses one part of the total mythical picture for its own purposes. The total picture has four levels. From highest to lowest levels, these are "apocalyptic," "idyllic," "ordinary," and "demonic." These four levels account for the types of dream imagery in fiction. The dialectical nature of dream symbolism can be seen in the opposition between apocalyptic or heavenly and demonic or infernal imagery. A less intense opposition exists between idyllic, Garden of Eden imagery and ordinary, mundane world imagery. The cyclical patterns of ritual appear in this universe as the character movements, descents and ascents, from one level to another. There are two kinds of descent: the descent from a higher world to the quotidian one, the ordinary level of the natural world, and the descent from this one into the lower level, the subterranean or submarine level of hell. The two kinds of ascent are the ascent from the lower level to this one and the ascent from this one to the higher levels. The descent or ascent pattern a story takes will depend upon which ritual pattern the story imitates. The romantic dragon quest is based upon the pattern of a descent and return from the lower world. It is patterned after such myths as the myth of Jonah who is swallowed by the dragon, carried down alive to the bottom of the sea, then returned to the land. Comedy takes a similar pattern, but the analogy for the lower world in comedy is far less demonic and violent than the romantic version, and the comic return is similarly not as idealized as the romantic. Tragedy is based upon a ritual sacrifice of a heroic individual. The tragic hero descends from a higher to a lower world. He does not return. Irony, based upon the ritual tearing apart of the sacrificial victim, imitates this ritual by dissolving the mythological universe into a parody vision. In the mythos of irony, an ascent pattern toward heaven might also be an ascent toward an apocalyptic version of hell.

The mythological universe should be by now as visible as it is familiar. The highest level or apocalyptic level is the Judeo-Christian heaven. This level is the home of the biblical God and of the classical gods. It is associated with light, heavenly stars and spheres, music, law, justice, salvation, eternity, and many other recurrent images. Displacement of an archetype from this level into literature can be seen, for instance, whenever God, a unity of three persons, is displaced into the image of the unified body of a state or into any image of a group or union of people as a body. Such a unified body would probably be associated too with law, justice, and so on. God figures are generally old men with white beards. Such a figure might appear in a romance as a wise old man with a flowing white beard. The "crucifixion" which appears in Ahab's face is a good example of the displacement of a Christian symbol into the development of a romantic character.

The next level, the idyllic level, is slightly lower than the apocalyptic one. This idyllic level is, in Judeo-Christian myth, traditionally the level of the Garden of Eden. It is where man lived before the fall. Therefore it is usually "the highest point in the world, as it is geographically in Dante." It is associated with innocence and with the original identity of humanity. It is a type of green world of absolute peace and love among individuals and of harmony between humanity and nature. Displacements of this type into fiction include the pastoral idyllic world of romance and the garden retreat of more "realistic" fiction. Utopias and false utopias are also usually displacements of this level. The idyllic level exists as a higher level of experience than is attainable in the ordinary level, which is the mortal, fallen level of mundane existence. People live in this level now, but this level is not their true home. Their true home is in the idyllic world. In a story with a "realistic" setting, the ordinary level is usually the starting point of the action. As the story develops, however, the analogies for the other levels begin to emerge. Moby-Dick opens in New York. Ishmael leaves New York and goes to sea. The sea is of course a part of the natural world, but the imagery with which Melville presents it turns it into a displacement of the lower demonic level of the mythological universe. The lower level is the Judeo-Christian hell. It is associated with suffering, paralysis, and death, and is the home of monsters, demons, and dragons, much as the apocalyptic level is the home of the gods. All forms of human sacrifice and tragedy show up in the lower level. The apocalyptic God might be displaced into the symbol of a unified body, but the lower world devils and demons can be displaced into a rioting mob.

In the romantic dragon quest structure of Moby-Dick, the mythological universe is displaced into a highly stylized, "realistic" setting. The quotation marks around the term "realism" are there to stress that "realism" represents just as much a set of literary conventions as any other form. In Moby-Dick, the apocalyptic level of God is highly ambivalent. It can be perceived only by intuition. It is associated with goodness and immortality of the soul. But Moby Dick, the archetypal dragon of evil and death, is often presented with apocalyptic imagery. His white color, for example, is the color of the "veil of the Christian's Deity" and yet also "the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Hence the apocalyptic level is associated both with good and evil, but this level transcends the physical universe and is therefore inscrutable to human understanding. The idyllic level is displaced into the inner spiritual life of man and particularly of Ishmael. This level is favorably associated with the apocalyptic level as Ishmael shows when, describing his inner idyllic world, he sees "long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti." Ishmael's bosom companion, the virtuous cannibal Queequeg, comes from a South Sea island which is analogous to an idyllic world and set apart from the corruption of the fallen, civilized land world or ordinary level in Moby-Dick. The lower demonic level has its analogy in the sea world. The romantic, cyclical movement through these levels imitates the myth of Jonah. Ishmael descends into the sea world, where he is swallowed by Ahab's tragedy. Within the belly of this tragedy, Ishmael undergoes a conversion experience similar to Jonah's, and this experience enables him to discover and "ascend," in terms of archetypal symbolism, to the idyllic world within his soul. Ishmael's survival of the Pequod's tragedy is thus linked to this inner discovery much as Jonah's salvation is linked to his repentance in the dragon's belly.

The romance is the most stylized and idealistic form of literature. The dialectical principle of fiction is stronger in this form than in any other. Romance presents a sharply defined vision of the mythological universe. The hero is conventionally associated with the idyllic level. He descends into a lower world which is the demonic antithesis of his identity. In it he struggles with villains, demons, dragons, and other symbols of evil. Moby-Dick takes place in a "realistic" setting, but the symbolism with which Melville presents his story follows the definite formal polarities of romantic convention for all of that. Ishmael, the heroic quester, is associated with the virtuous Queequeg and with the inner idyllic world. He is thus presented in polar opposition to the demonic imagery with which Melville depicts the sharkish sea and Ahab's tragedy. Ishmael is contemplative, Ahab aggressive. The White Whale represents a highly romantic vision of metaphysical dualism. Moby Dick is both good and evil, body and soul. The White Whale is a highly undisplaced form of the archetypal lower world romantic dragon, but Melville manages to jar conventions by associating him often with apocalyptic imagery to suggest that heaven and hell are leagued in this dragon much as they are in the pact between God and Satan in the Book of Job. Ahab is a tragic hero, but he is less involved in the confused and tumultuous events of the conventional tragic hero's isolation from society than he is in a highly idealized struggle with nature and with a supernatural White Whale.

Again, Moby-Dick is an "encyclopedic romance." The term "encyclopedic" describes the thematic aspect of the work that formally imitates the scope and complexity of biblical and classical myth as a whole, or indeed of any of the world's great mythologies as a whole. Nothing prohibits a Western writer from getting a hold of Oriental mythology and of learning it so well that he is able to write a magnificent epic imitation of it. But, clearly, the most important mythologies for the Western writer have been biblical and classical. Writing being an act of communication, the author intends to communicate effectively to his audience. His or her chances of doing so increase when he or she uses the accepted symbolism of society in conventional ways, both consciously and unconsciously. The term "encyclopedic" describes Moby-Dick's formal and thematic tendency toward mythical comprehensiveness and scope. The Bible forms, according to Frye, "two concentric quest myths"; one being the "Genesis-apocalypse" myth and the other the "Exodus-millennium" myth. Each quest myth structure contains within it a union of all four types of fiction: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. Hence an encyclopedic work on the level of archetypal form would similarly unify all four of the archetypal forms of literature within it. Melville unites Ishmael's romantic quest with the archetypal forms of irony and tragedy to give his romantic dragon quest an encyclopedic or epic tendency of development like the Bible's. But Moby-Dick falls short of being a full prose epic, which is why it is being termed here an encyclopedic romance and not a romantic epic.

The romance is a three-part form. Its three stages are: first, the stage of conflict or the "agon" in which the hero commences his descent into the lower world and passes through a series of minor adventures; second, the stage of death struggle or the "pathos" in which either the hero or a substitute is killed; and third, the stage of symbolic rebirth or the "anagnorisis" in which the hero ascends out of the lower world and returns to the idyllic level. Of all the forms of literature, the romantic quest is the best suited for epic development because its central theme of death, rebirth, and return imitates the epic quest theme of death, rebirth, and resurrection. The romantic quester is analogous to the mythical Messiah or Christ—for whom Jonah is a prototype—who descends from a higher world to this one to save the captives and lead them to salvation. If the romantic quester is like Jonah, then the analogy follows that he is descending into the belly of the dragon to save others and lead them to salvation by his example. Within the Genesis-apocalypse myth Moby-Dick imitates, the Christian epic contains the tragedy of Christ's death. Ishmael's descent into the sea world contains Ahab's tragedy.

Ishmael is the hero of the story until the Pequod embarks. Suddenly dark Ahab makes his appearance and seizes control of the action as Ishmael gradually begins to fade out of it. Melville uses what Frye calls the romantic "double" or "doppelganger" theme to develop this transition. Briefly and simply stated, the conventional theme develops in the following manner. The hero descends to a lower world or to some analogy of one. He loses his identity. Either he forgets who he is or his fortunes change and society forgets who he is: lost or mistaken identity is a major theme of his descent. In the demonic lower world, the hero meets a character who appears to be his duplicate or double. As the hero begins to uncover the mystery of his identity, he discovers the true identity of his double to be that of a sinister lower world figure. To escape from the lower world, the hero must also escape from the double, and the double then becomes a symbol of a false or self-destructive identity. The classical myth from which this archetypal theme derives is the myth of Narcissus whose double is the shadow in the reflecting pool. This shadow is of course the portent of his death. Narcissus loses the struggle with the shadow, but he is reborn as a flower. The same theme shapes the myth of Christ. Christ is first a God. He descends to earth to take the form of his human double, much as Narcissus plunges into the water to take the form of his shadow. Christ's human double becomes a tragic victim; he is murdered. But Christ is reborn as God and ascends to heaven.

Ishmael is the romantic hero in Moby-Dick. He descends from the ordinary world into the lower sea world. There he meets his double, Ahab. Much as God disappears into the identity of Christ, Ishmael disappears into the lower world identity of Ahab. The mergence of identity is structurally symbolized by the way in which Ahab appears to replace Ishmael as the main character of the narrative. Ahab dies, a tragic victim. In the Epilogue, Ishmael's survival is presented with the imagery of the mythical birth of the romantic hero. The way Ishmael is thus reborn out of Ahab's tragedy imitates the way God is reborn out of Christ's. Moby-Dick contains not only a tragedy, however, it contains also a highly ingenious use of the mythos of irony. When the Pequod embarks, a narrative split occurs. The dominant side of the split is devoted to cetology. On the other side, Ahab begins his quest. The narrative split is designed to remove Ishmael gradually from the action and to provide the shift in focus to Ahab's tragedy. The cetological material is organized as a satiric quest into the anatomy of the whale and out again. By covering a broad variety of themes, the cetological quest considerably broadens the dimensions of Ishmael's character. More importantly, it develops the double theme by showing how similar Ishmael's view of the world is to Ahab's. Ishmael and Ahab are both awed by the metaphysical mysteries of existence and both of them have intuitions of the power of evil in the natural world.

The other important function of Melville's cetological satire is to create romantic plausibility for a work with a relatively "realistic" setting. Ishmael transforms a "realistic" White Whale into an inscrutable mythical being. He satirically annihilates simplistic explanations for natural phenomena. Melville's method is to develop radically that mixture of fact and fancy Hawthorne described as his aim for The House of the Seven Gables. The romance differs from the novel, Hawthorne says in the preface, by presenting not the "probable and ordinary course of man's experience" but rather the "fancy-pictures" which may almost be brought "into positive contact with the realities of the moment." Melville uses irony to transform the "real" world into a mythical and fabulous one. His irony undermines the "realistic" meanings of the world's outer appearance to reveal the metaphysical struggle which rages behind the masks of the visible world. As the Pequod gets further and further away from civilized, rational illusions about "reality," the story gets closer to the "reality" of this struggle and to the "reality" of the fabulous dragon Moby Dick. Melville completes the transformation by means of the descriptive method with which he presents the death struggle with the White Whale. He confirms in every way that Moby Dick is both supernatural and intelligent, but whether he is also ultimately good or evil, principle or agent, remains part of his mythical inscrutability.

Two interior quest patterns thus run side by side through what will be called here, using Howard P. Vincent's expression in The Trying-Out of "Moby Dick," the "cetological center" of the work. The cetological material is organized into a quest pattern which dominates this part of the narrative. After it ends, Ahab's quest emerges to dominate the action completely to the end. The term "quest" or "quest pattern" describes a structural pattern in a literary work. It has set characteristics. These include the three-part form which has already been sketched in, and also all the finer distinctions with which Frye further defines each of these parts: the descent develops the theme of lost or mistaken identity, for instance; the conflict leads to the death struggle with the dragon; the return from the lower world has three stages of its own: recognition, separation from the demonic, and restoration of memory. All of these parts will be explained in context later. What is important here is that the term "quest," or "quest pattern," be understood as the abstract structural term it is. It is possible to have a quest structure for a work as a whole and also to have characters within that overall quest pattern each developing according to separate quest patterns of their own. Moby-Dick forms around Ishmael's quest into the sea world. His experience is the containing form for the story. Within this large overall pattern, Ishmael embarks on a satiric cetological quest, while Ahab embarks on a tragic quest for a White Whale. Moby-Dick is an encyclopedic romance because its formal complexity approaches the complexity of biblical myth as a whole. Within the containing form of Ishmael's romantic quest, Moby-Dick unites three of the four archetypal forms of literature: romance, irony, and tragedy.

The use of the term "quest" in literary criticism is thus analogous to the use of the term "sonata form" in musical criticism. The overall development of the symphony takes the sonata form. The four-movement symphony usually presents a first movement which is itself in sonata form. The term varies in definition, slightly, depending, then, on whether or not it is being used to discuss the inner structure of a movement or to discuss the overall structure of the work as it develops from movement to movement. In much the same way, the term "quest," or "quest pattern," in a work as complex as Moby-Dick gives form to the narrative as a whole as well as to two important parts of that whole, the cetological quest and Ahab's quest.

Moby-Dick is a work of four narrative movements, and the title of the final chapter before the finale, namely, "The Symphony," suggests that perhaps Melville consciously intended some degree of an analogy between Moby-Dick and the sonata form. The first movement acts as the epical overture by developing the central romantic theme of fraternalism between Ishmael and Queequeg. The second movement or cetological center has an analogy to the long and expressive second movement of the symphony; the thematic complexity of this satiric center considerably slows down the narrative tempo, to be sure. The third movement of the symphony is the scherzo or dance movement. In Moby-Dick this movement takes form as Ahab's tragic Dionysian dance toward catastrophe. And the fourth movement, the three-day chase, presents the thundering finale. The symphony links its movements together by contrasting yet related tonal variations created by changes in key from movement to movement; Frye compares his mythoi to musical keys. Hence, the dominant use of one mythos or another establishes the work's mode or literary key. In Moby-Dick the first movement is romantic, the second, in contrast, is satiric. The two are related by the theme of creating romantic plausibility for a "realistic" tale. The third and fourth movements shift the level of irony from satire to tragedy. The finale differs from the third movement's fatal progression by its strict concentration on presenting the death struggle.

Frye entitles his book Anatomy of Criticism to stress that his book is an anatomy of the existing critical approaches and that it is also an attempt to show how these approaches might be unified under one theory of criticism as a whole. As he said in his "Polemical Introduction," the Anatomy of Criticism must be regarded as an "interconnected group of suggestions" which will be of some practical value. But the true Anatomy of Literature has yet to be written. Thus, as Frye says, there are "gaps" in his descriptions and definitions of the archetypes. The archetypes need to be more fully defined so that a Western myth can be more clearly distinguished from a similar myth in another culture, for example. Frazer's The Golden Bough helps to make distinctions as well as show similarities between myths, but Frazer's book does not define literary conventions. Some qualified scholar should surely be equal to the task of descending into the labyrinth of biblical myth and of returning with a complete grammar of archetypes. The archetypal grammar would seem to be the necessary engine for traversing the dim gulf that now exists between the Anatomy of Criticism and an Anatomy of Literature. In this study, however, Frye's definitions and suggestions have been followed as closely as possible. Let it be stated from the beginning, then, that all the ideas on archetypal theory and form in this study are Frye's and all praise for them goes to him. The application of these ideas, except where indicated, is the author's and its success or failure is his.

## Chapter 2: Descent to a Lower World

The first narrative movement of Moby-Dick, from "Loomings" through "Merry Christmas," presents the first stage of Ishmael's dragon quest, the agon or conflict between "reality" and illusion of the opening adventures in New York, New Bedford, and Nantucket. As he tells Captain Peleg, Ishmael wants "to see what whaling is," he wants "to see the world." He begins his quest in a conventional romantic manner: he goes in quest of wisdom. He is confused, he is angry; life is a woe. Though Ishmael is in no condition to understand exactly what he is doing when he first goes to sea, Ishmael seeks, in however unconscious a way, that wisdom which will lead him to the idyllic world of peace and joy within his soul. Killing dragon whales, Ishmael thinks, will be a substitute for killing himself. But that desire to slay himself is the dragon with which Ishmael must struggle. It is the dragon he must slay. Ishmael's quest commences as a descent into a displaced, archetypal lower world of darkness, dream, and death. The motif of amnesia or of the hero's loss of identity plays a major part in this theme of descent. In quest of his true identity, Ishmael comes to the reflecting pool of the lower sea world. Like Narcissus, he sees his shadow in the pool. That shadow is Ahab, the "ungraspable phantom of life," the "key to it all." Ishmael plunges into identity with it. "Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock," Ishmael says, "here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."

According to Frye, "reality" in romance is not the same thing as "reality" outside of romance. When Frye uses the term "reality" in connection with romance, he is talking about the romantic hero's "reality," not about the so-called "reality" of the non-literary world. Frye says this other "reality" only occasionally resembles the "reality" of literature when life seems "almost on the point of making sense." The reason why "reality" in literature, and particularly in romance, does seem to make sense is that literature is based on conventional assumptions about "reality." These conventions raise conventional expectations about what will and what will not happen in any given world. They thus give the illusion of making sense themselves. Whether they actually do make sense or not, as Frye says, is fortunately not a matter for literary critics to decide. But of course, in life when expectations are satisfied by chance or coincidence, as they so often are in romance, then this "reality" can seem romantic too. But as Frye says, the assumption that literary forms of "reality" are the same things as this other "reality" can only lead to the schizophrenia which Don Quixote and literal interpreters of mythical literature suffer—interpreters such as South Sea cannibals, South American headhunters, and their Christian and Jewish counterparts. Hence there are different contexts of "reality." Take, for example, the Jewish assumption that the Old Testament God has no human image in metaphysical "reality." Now turn the same coin over from the blank, Jewish side to the side with Christ's engraving on it. The same Old Testament God now appears in the form of Christ, complete with halo, beard, and so on: but both assumptions about the metaphysical "reality" of God to begin with are no different from cannibal Queequeg's assumption that if this Judeo-Christian God actually does indeed exist, He must look something like Yojo. In romance "reality" is the term which describes the hero's state of existence or identity in an idyllic world, no matter how fanciful, "unreal," or even similar to the outlandish religious notions of the idyllic world this romantic one may seem to be. It is "reality," be it Marxist, Maoist, or democratic, Christian, Jewish, or cannibalistic.

The romantic hero descends from "reality" in the idyllic world. This "reality" is a higher level of existence than that of the ordinary level. The archetypal idyllic world, as Frye describes it, appears as a Garden of Eden type of "social setting reduced to the love of individual men and women within an order of nature which has been reconciled to humanity." This type of "reality" does not appear in "Loomings." Ishmael has already descended from the idyllic world to the ordinary one, and he is in the process of preparing quickly to descend and escape from the ordinary level into the lower sea world, the Moby-Dick version or displacement of hell, the demonic level. The landsmen Ishmael depicts in New York do not live in romantic "reality." Nearly the entire population, "thousands upon thousands of mortal men," is under the hypnotic spell of "ocean reveries." "Are the green fields gone?" Ishmael asks. "What do they here?" Their lives are monotonous enough, "of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks." The entire society lives under a gigantic illusion of freedom. All its members are entranced and held captive. But Ishmael is not entranced. He has no place in this world, and he does not want one, as if a god would trade places with one of the damned. At least he is not entranced in the same way as these others are even if many landsmen do "cherish very nearly the same feelings toward the ocean" that Ishmael does. Ishmael abominates "all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever." He does not like the land world. Altogether, the result of life in society for Ishmael is such "hypos" that "it requires a strong moral principle" to keep him "from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." The land world is not idyllic "reality." Ishmael is clearly superior to it. He comes from a higher world.

But where is the idyllic world? The point is that Ishmael does not yet know. He knows that he is morally superior to the ordinary world, and that he is not of that world. "In fact take my body who will," Ishmael says in the Whaleman's Chapel, "take it I say, it is not me." But he cannot remember enough of his earlier life to know where the origins of his soul might be. He makes a conventional connection between his original identity and Adam's in the Garden of Eden while in the Whaleman's Chapel, a good setting for such conventional reflection. But Ishmael is not sure what the connection is, if indeed there is one at all. He wonders "in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago . . ." The mystery of Ishmael's true identity is a central romantic theme of descent. Frye calls this theme the "motif of amnesia." This motif conventionally begins the romance with a "break in consciousness," one which often involves actual forgetfulness of the previous state." This break, Frye says, "may be internalized as a break in memory, or externalized as a change in fortunes or social context." Ishmael suffers from both the internal and the external break. He is clearly an intellectual, a well-educated gentleman for all of his joking with the faulty conjugation of "to think," as when he says "thinks I," or for all his use of the vulgar "ain't," as when he says, "I ain't insured." It seems hardly worth adding that Ishmael is intellectual enough to write Moby-Dick. But clearly he descends the social scale when he goes whaling. Misfortune has overtaken him, and left him penniless, but he is plainly of genteel origins. His internal "break in consciousness" is even more severe than the external one. "Call me Ishmael," he says, as if with ironic anger throwing a herringbone to a dogfish. It is a good name for a man without a place in the land world, its common usage being to denote an exile or outcast. Ishmael seems to be the best name he can think of. He suffers from amnesia. He has been "involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral" he has met. And then his hypos have been attacking him so severely that it is all he can do to "quietly take to the ship." It is no wonder, then, that he believes some "invisible police officer of the Fates" to have the "constant surveillance" of him.

But what is Ishmael's identity? The myth of Jonah provides the archetypal skeleton around which Melville molds the flesh of Ishmael's character. Like Ishmael, Jonah is confused about his identity. He is one of God's prophets, but he does not like being one. He tries to escape his duty by fleeing to the sea world just as Ishmael does. The way in which Mapple presents this flight is clearly associated with the way Ishmael presents his own. Mapple describes Jonah as a man whose guilt is obvious to all who see him: "Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent." Hence the questioning Jonah receives by his shipmates and by his captain resembles the similar going over Captains Peleg and Bildad give Ishmael later. Peleg asks Ishmael, for instance, "But flukes! Man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?" Jonah, too, is a self-elected exile and outcast whose attempt to escape rouses such suspicions. He, like Ishmael, rejects the land world. But Jonah is guilty in the eyes of his God, while Ishmael is innocent in his own—though a good many of the whalemen sailors have been pirates and murderers. Ishmael describes his shipmates generally as a crew "chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals." Hence Peleg's "half humorous innuendos" represent some of the many early signs and indicators which show that Ishmael is entering into the romantic lower world of violence and fraud.

From the opening of Moby-Dick on, Ishmael attacks conventions of "reality" commonly accepted outside of romance. His purpose is to tear these conventionally accepted assumptions, and particularly the metaphysical ones, fin from fin further on in his narrative, but in the first part of Moby-Dick he goes to work on these assumptions by showing how romantic the "unromantic" nineteenth-century whaling world can be. "Reality," it has been said, is actually the point of view toward experience taken from the perspective of the idyllic world. The romantic hero's identity is with this idyllic world. All experience which is not compatible with his idyllic world vision is alien to him and "unreal." The opposite of "reality" is illusion. The lower world into which the hero descends is thus for him a world of illusions. Hence in New York, an entire population is spellbound, living under a gigantic illusion. The lower demonic world of the mythological universe is the polar opposite of the idyllic world. Its illusions are more dangerous and deceptive than the ordinary level's. The figure of Satan, for example, is an archetypal fraud of the lower world. In Judeo-Christian myth, deception at the hands of this figure can result in eternal damnation. Classical deceivers include sirens and Medusas and the like. The siren is the original femme fatale of myth who with her beauty lures sailors to their drowning doom. The opposite of the siren's beauty is the Medusa's ugliness. The Medusa is so ugly that one glance at her turns the gazer to stone. Much of the illusion in the lower world, however, develops around the theme of the hero's mistaken identity. To him the inhabitants of the lower world live in illusion because they do not recognize him as the hero he is. King Arthur clears up illusions about his identity when he pulls the sword from the stone; Christ rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven. From the very beginning, Ishmael's displacement of the sea world, which at first glance resembles that other "real" world, is romanticized and shaped to an archetypal pattern of development. Ishmael goes on to develop the motif of amnesia more fully by creating another dramatic "break in consciousness" to go with the one that has taken place before the story starts, as Ishmael passes from ordinary New York into the lower sea world.

When Ishmael arrives in New Bedford, it is dark and cold. He is lost. He has no place to stay the night. He is poor. He wanders through the dark, cold town as if he were descending into a labyrinth and winding his way down into the lower world within it. "Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb." Associations with death, as in the case of this "tomb" image, for instance, proliferate around Ishmael's opening adventures. He is entering the lower world. Mistaking a Negro church for an inn, Ishmael enters: "It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet," wherein a "black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit." This sign represents one of the many "mirror images" which play such an important part in Moby-Dick's opening. "Modulations of the mirror image bring us to the pictures, tapestries, and statues which so often turn up near the beginning of a romance," Frye says, "to indicate the threshold of the romance world." Ishmael sees the Spouter-Inn sign, pauses before it, and fixes his attention on it. "Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion," he says. Indeed, just as the "Angel of Doom" Ishmael sees in the Negro church foreshadows dark Ahab, here this sign foreshadows the connection between the inn where Ishmael meets Queequeg, Coffin's inn, and the coffin, Queequeg's, which saves Ishmael's life.

Ishmael's opening adventures develop as an anxiety dream which ends in romantic wishfulfillment. The action all leads up to Ishmael's introduction to Queequeg. The meeting between these two characters completes the "break in consciousness" between ordinary New York and the marvelous sea world. Hence the opening sequence of episodes develops the theme of falling asleep in one world and of waking up in quite another. Ishmael passes from one level of the mythological universe into a lower one. The archetypal sequence begins appropriately at night in New Bedford, the symbolic threshold of the sea world. The atmosphere is rife with anxiety. Ishmael arrives. Nothing is certain. He finds the Spouter-Inn. It is a dark "dilapidated" building with "one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly." Inside the Spouter-Inn is a bizarre museum of whaling world mirror symbols. Ishmael steps from a cold, dark, wintery street directly into the whaling world. The first mirror image he comes to is the Spouter-Inn oil painting. It is "enough to drive a nervous man distracted." This strange picture, like the other symbols of the lower world, exerts its spell over Ishmael's imagination. The picture "fairly froze" Ishmael to it. He feels compelled "to find out what that marvelous painting meant." It is a symbol of the dark, nightmarish experience Ishmael himself is to undergo. In its dim, dark symbolism, the painting foreshadows the Pequod's freakish fate. It presents, Ishmael thinks, a ship being stove and sunk by an enormous whale.

On the other side of the Spouter-Inn's entry hangs a "heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears" associated with "death harvesting." The entrance to the Spouter-Inn, then, presents an entrance into a labyrinthine cavelike setting. Ishmael winds on "through yon low-arched way" into the inn's public room, which is likened to the hold of a ship: ". . . you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously." One side of this room is full of "cracked glass cases filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks"; the other, with a "dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale's head." Inside the whale's jaws at its entrance the bartender works "like another Jonah" selling sailors "deliriums and death." On one side of the inn's entry is a painting, a symbol of illusion. On the other side of the entry are real whaling weapons, symbols of experience in the whaling world. Similarly, on one side of the public room is a symbolic leviathan and Jonah. And on the other side of the public room, opposite Jonah, are fragments gathered from all over the world, symbolizing the limits of experience in the whaling world. Ishmael enters a world where experience and illusion come together, reflect and interchange with each other, just as the two sides of the Spouter-Inn create a polarized opposition and strange mirroring effect.

A crowd of mariners bursts into the Spouter-Inn like an "eruption of bears from Labrador." Bulkington, the "huge favorite" of his shipmates, enters with the crowd to cast his own magnetic spell over the narrative. He is a physical and spiritual ideal. Bulkington "stood almost six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a cofferdam." His accent "announced" him to be a "Southerner." Ishmael imagines him to be "one of those tall moutaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia." Like such others as Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, Bulkington has the muscle, the force of character, and the democratic dignity which for Melville form the basis of an ideal American folk hero, the Handsome Sailor, as Melville calls this ideal in Billy Budd. Bulkington represents the freedom of all "deep, earnest thinking." In terms of archetypal symbolism, the freedom of thought Ishmael and Bulkington strive for exists between heaven and earth, or in the idyllic world. And as Ishmael survives the Pequod's catas-trophe, he raises his heroic voice in praise of the quest for freedom. He invokes Bulkington's blessing on his work as he launches the Pequod's tragic quest with the stirring cry: "Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"

Bulkington's sudden dramatic appearance and just as sudden disappearance from the narrative contribute to the dreamlike flow of the action. This increases Ishmael's anxiety too, as while looking on Bulkington's admirable character, Ishmael has all the more an awareness of the weirdness of the harpooneer with whom he will have to stay the night. It gets late. Ishmael is too worried to turn in. He decides against sharing a bed. But after making an exasperating attempt at setting himself up for the night on a bench, Ishmael gives in. Coffin takes him upstairs to the room. The harpooneer's gear is scattered about it. Ishmael tries on Queequeg's poncho, takes a look in the mirror, and then gives himself a "kink in the neck" scrambling out of it. The sight frightens him. Ishmael worries a while longer, but at last commends himself to the "care of heaven," and tumbles into bed. Just as he is drifting off into a troubled doze,. he is awakened by the befuddling entrance of the harpooneer. Cannibal Queequeg shuffles in, a grotesque ogrelike apparition out of nightmare: "Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares." With one hand, Queequeg navigates a candle; with the other, he snatches a "New Zealand head."

Here Melville employs a common nightmare motif: speechless horror. Ishmael is unable to budge. He does not know what to do, so he waits and watches, in speechless horror. Queequeg goes about his business, stashes the shrunken head in his grego, then fumbles out his tomahawk pipe. But when Queequeg takes off his new beaver hat, Ishmael comes "nigh singing out with fresh surprise." Queequeg's "bald, purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull." The suspense heightens. Ishmael remains speechless, as tongue-tied as Billy Budd before the perverted Claggart. Nevertheless, Queequeg has his nightly prayers to attend to; Yojo must be conciliated. Tension mounts, but, too late, Queequeg suddenly ends his ceremonies, bags Yojo, and, in an instant, is in bed "giving a sudden grunt of astonishment" to find Ishmael there. The nightmare climaxes. Queequeg is up in arms, and swinging his tomahawk. "Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" Ishmael shouts, "Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!" Coffin arrives, introduces Queequeg, and initiates the famous friendship. The episode ends in pure romantic wishfulfillment. Ishmael turns in and sleeps better than ever before in his life.

Queequeg's character is based on the conventional romantic type Frye calls the "golux," a name from a character type in James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks. "Such characters," Frye says, "are, more or less, children of nature, who can be brought to serve the hero, like Crusoe's Friday, but retain the inscrutability of their origin." Queequeg is of mysterious origin. He comes from the South Sea island of Kokovoko, which Ishmael romanticizes by saying, "It is not down on any map; true places never are." Queequeg is a child of nature, to be sure. He has all the innocence and unconsciousness of a child, mostly because he is a primitive, uncivilized character who has not learned to imitate the pomposity of Western manhood. Queequeg is in no need of a physic on this score. Then, of course, Queequeg is very closely associated with nature. The tattoos on his legs look as if "a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms." As Frye says, the golux is a lower world figure who always "has just the abilities the hero needs in a crisis." Queequeg is certainly a dependable golux. Time and time again, he comes to the rescue with one prodigious feat after another. On the voyage from New Bedford to Nantucket, he dives into the freezing ocean to save a bumpkin from drowning. But first he saves the ship from capsizing by lassoing the ship's loose boom and making it fast. Queequeg decides that proof of his skill as a harpooneer seems in order to convince Peleg and Bildad to hire him. He springs into action, and hurls his harpoon with all the flair of a Musketeer brandishing his sword. Tashtego falls into a sinking, decapitated whale's head. Queequeg delivers him. A sinking whale carcass nearly pulls the Pequod over. Where is Queequeg? Over there, saving the day again, this time by chopping loose the chains to the whale with his hatchet. All these feats are Queequeg's, not to mention the convenient coffin lifebuoy he supplies for Ishmael.

The romance creates polar oppositions between heroes and villains, Frye says. "Hence every typical character in romance tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game." Queequeg is a heroic golux. His demonic opposite is Fedallah. Like Queequeg, Fedallah is a character of mysterious origins. He is closely associated with nature, and even with the supernatural. Except, Fedallah does not come from the idyllic isle Queequeg does. Queequeg is a character out of a wishfulfillment dream, but Fedallah steps out of nightmare. "He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly . . ." Queequeg is all virtue, yet has a touch of Calvinistic depravity in the form of his cannibalism. Fedallah is all evil. He is a descendant, Ishmael thinks, of the "mundane amours" between devils and the daughters of men. To Stubb and Flask, Fedallah is the devil himself. Stubb even suggests that Fedallah makes a good parallel for the Satan of the Book of Job. To Stubb, Fedallah's unaccountable influence over Ahab is similar to Satan's influence over Job. Fedallah does indeed seem to have supernatural power. He prophesies that he will die before Ahab does. So he does die, only he fulfills his part of the prophecy so accurately that when he appears to pilot Ahab still to his doom from Moby Dick's back, Stubb's suspicions seem almost confirmed. Fedallah may well have been the devil himself.

The other goluxes, Tashtego and Daggoo, are mainly devices which Melville uses to heighten the romantic atmosphere and to help develop the romantic theme of doubling or mirroring. For instance, each officer is paired or doubled with one of these savages. Each doubling, in turn, is polarized against another. On one pole is the Ishmael-Queequeg friendship. Queequeg is Starbuck's harpooner and Ishmael is a member of Starbuck's boat crew. Starbuck is the only character who openly opposes Ahab; Queequeg is the virtuous opposite of Fedallah. Thus the other pole is the Ahab-Fedallah doubling. In between these two poles are the doublings between Stubb and Tashtego and Flask and Daggoo. These characters exist between the moral poles of virtue and vice which the opposition between Starbuck and Ahab suggests. Stubb and Flask are not as virtuous as Starbuck or as flawed as Ahab. Daggoo and Tashtego are not as virtuous as Queequeg or as evil as Fedallah. Melville heightens the romantic effect of the action by describing these savages in picturesque poses during the lowerings for whales, and during other sensational moments. His method is to touch on all three together whenever he mentions one of them. For example, in "The Candles" as lightning flashes on deck and Ahab madly scolds the heavens, Ishmael depicts each savage in a striking pose: Daggoo "loomed up to thrice his real stature," Tashtego "revealed his shark-white teeth," and "Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body."

The friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg in the first part of Moby-Dick completes Ishmael's romantic "break in consciousness," and conveys Ishmael safely into the lower world with Queequeg as his guardian spirit. As has been said, Ishmael goes to sleep with Queequeg, and then the long sequence of episodes of anxiety comes to an end in wishfulfillment. This sleep, then, is the symbolic "break in consciousness" of the first part. Ishmael has already undergone one such break before the story begins, but now he passes from the ordinary level of the mythological universe into the lower sea world. When he arrives in New Bedford, it is dark, and he sees little of the town. But after his dreamlike meeting with Queequeg that night, the next morning Ishmael wakes to find himself in the romantic dream world. Queequeg is hugging him. Ishmael's "sensations were strange." They remind him of an experience of his childhood, "a somewhat similar circumstance," and Ishmael is still unsure "whether it was a reality or a dream." The striking aspect, then, of the dream experience Ishmael goes on to describe is that it presents, in terms of archetypal symbolism, a "break in consciousness," and one which includes the loss of a symbolic idyllic world. The experience happens to Ishmael during his childhood, a romantic symbol of innocence. It takes place during the "longest day in the year," or "June 21," and hence in summer, the period of the year conventionally associated with romance. Ishmael is punished for "cutting up some caper or other." He loses an idyllic summer's day by being sent to bed early or by being sent into a night world. He must go to his room and to bed. What follows is a nightmare of a "supernatural hand" clasping his. He is unable to budge he is so "frozen with the most awful fears." He is under the most "horrid spell." He is in the nightmarish lower world. Then, "for days and weeks and months afterwards" he "lost" himself—symbolic of the loss of identity—"in confounding attempts to explain the mystery."

When with Queequeg, Ishmael feels similar sensations to the ones aroused by this dream. Just as before he has fallen into experience from childhood to adolescence to manhood, so again he must fall. But the "strangeness" of the new world he enters now is different. Before he has lived through a nightmare, but now he wakes to find himself in a "comical predicament." Queequeg's friendship is strange, and yet it is fun, too. Ishmael hardly knows what to make of it. He awakens Queequeg finally, but watches him dress, his "curiosity getting the better of his breeding." "Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day," Ishmael says, "he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding." Then Ishmael himself gets up. At breakfast he is once against amused, this time by the sheepish whalemen at table: "A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!" Ishmael sallies "out for a stroll." The world is all new. He sees "the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts" and "actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners." The crowd jostles with city and bumpkin dandies, and with mariners from all over the world. The sight is pure spectacle. "It makes a stranger stare," says Ishmael, as if seeing the operatic curtain of the night draw back to reveal the glorious morning upon some bright, fantastic stage.

New Bedford is the threshold of the lower sea world. Hence in New Bedford Ishmael begins to discover the deceptiveness of the lower world. He begins to see its dual nature, its mixture of illusion and "reality." Ishmael enters New Bedford at night. The town is a cold, forbidding place. But New Bedford is also one of the whaleman's greatest cities. Whalemen have dragged the city up, as Ishmael says, from the "Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans." They have built this city from their hard-won earnings in the fishery. There are thus two sides to this town. It can appear at times like an idyllic world. "In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold." The town flowers into a wonderful place, "And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses." Melville uses garden symbolism to paint the town with romantic colors. But only one side of life in New Bedford is visible in this portrait. The other side is the side Ishmael glimpses first upon his arrival. It is the side of the whale hunt. So Ishmael passes very quickly from his view of the idyllic side of New Bedford life to a view of the opposite side, the side of suffering, sacrifice, and death in the fishery. He enters the Whaleman's Chapel. Here Ishmael faces the marble cenotaphs erected in memory of sailors lost at sea, more mirror images that intensify the dark mystery of the seaman's world. The transition from the wistful mood of summertime New Bedford to the wintertime sorrow of the Whaleman's Chapel is a keen one. Now Ishmael's thoughts turn to death.

Ishmael is now becoming aware of the death struggle ahead of him in the lower world, but he is unafraid. "And therefore three cheers for Nantucket, he says, "and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot." This optimistic belief in the immortality of the soul gives Ishmael the courage to face experience heroically. Even from the beginning of his quest, then, Ishmael chooses a fundamentally heroic optimism, one which will later starkly contrast with Ahab's tragic pessimism. Still, Ishmael is fortunate in his experience, while Ahab is not. Ishmael does not lose any limbs as Ahab does. Ishmael meets Queequeg, too, but then only Ishmael seems to be wise enough to appreciate and to open his mind fully to Queequeg. Ishmael later cites Solomon's book, or Proverbs, as an important source of wisdom for him, and these words from it, for example, express the central theme: "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding." Ishmael's mind is always alert to get both. As he sits quietly in the Whaleman's Chapel, he tries to understand all the symbolism and deeper meanings. Father Mapple in his pulpit "must symbolize something unseen," Ishmael thinks. Mirror images are all-pervasive here: cenotaphs line either side of the chapel; behind Mapple is a large painting of a ship in a storm; and the pulpit itself resembles a ship's prow. It even comes complete with a ship's rope ladder. Mapple indeed launches into a sermon on the myth of Jonah, a verbal mirror symbol of the kind of experience Ishmael himself is to undergo.

Mapple's isolation in his pulpit "signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions." Ishmael's own retreat to the whaling world could almost be described in the same way, as could Jonah's attempt to escape to Tarshish. Mapple is surrounded by cenotaphs, symbols of death. His "spiritual withdrawal" is a symbolic death. Behind him is the painting of a ship illuminated by a ray of light which beams from an angel's face. A storm rages outside the chapel. Mapple illuminates his congregation with the heavenly beam of his sermon. Similarly, Jonah, from the very belly of the dragon, turns to "look again toward" the "holy temple" of God. He, too, might be said to have been illuminated by a ray of spiritual light. Jonah undergoes a symbolic death. Then he is reborn. The pattern is one of death and rebirth, one which is central to a religious conversion experience, the death of one way of life, the birth of another. This pattern is also the basis of the romance form. It is the pattern that Ishmael himself is to undergo in his descent and return from the sea world. Ishmael has a type of conversion experience of a transcendent love for others in "A Squeeze of the Hand." But this experience does not come unprepared for. Ishmael's friendship with Queequeg, for example, helps to lead him to it. "No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world," Ishmael says. "This soothing savage had redeemed it." Queequeg's friendship stirs Ishmael's fraternal feelings for others. It sets him on the right way toward the self-discovery Mapple describes when he says, "Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self." And though Ishmael associates the inner faith in himself that he is to gain from his experience with "intuitions of some things heavenly," his faith is not the same thing as Jonah's faith in God. Jonah's faith is mythical; Ishmael's is romantic. Ishmael's is a faith in himself. For Ishmael, God and his ways are ultimately inscrutable.

Ishmael thus enters the whaling world by passing through all of the many mirror images and symbols of illusion at its threshold. The symbolic setting thus becomes more and more important. As it does so, the factual level of "reality" in Moby-Dick is transformed into the romantic "reality" of a displaced lower world of mystery and marvels. By the time Ishmael reaches the Pequod, the atmosphere is pregnant with lower world associations, all ready to give birth to many a mighty fancy. Immersed in this mystery, Ishmael goes to look for a job on a Nantucket whaler. Queequeg casts a spell over him with his Ramadan. Yojo has already decided upon the ship in which he and Ishmael are to sail together. Ishmael needs only to go and find it, and sign on. Of the three ships about to sail, Ishmael chooses the Pequod, a "cannibal of a craft." The ship, with all the ornate ivory inlaying round about the bulwarks, has a ghastly "original grotesqueness" about it. It is a "noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!" On it Ishmael encounters two enigmatical owners, Captains Peleg and Bildad. These two characters are displacements of the conventional romantic figure Frye describes as the "old wise man," Jung's term for one of his dream archetypes. These "old wise men" welcome Ishmael into the lower world, but they also advise and warn him to beware.

The "old wise man" figure of romance is just what his name suggests, a character who counsels and guides the hero, the way Merlin does Arthur, for example. Peleg and Bildad are brimming with counsel and guidance. Bildad's advice that Ishmael sign on for the seven-hundred and seventy-seventh lay is not, of course, the best of advice, the seven-hundred and seventy-seventh lay being that fraction of the voyage's net profits as wages. But there is even a lesson to be learned from Bildad's harsh counsel. He adds a biblical epigram to strengthen it, ". . . for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." As Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, he wrote Hawthorne, "I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head." The conflict between the themes of "head" and "heart" is an important one in Moby-Dick. Ahab represents the "head." He has the "high perception," but he lacks "heart," "the low enjoying power." Hence his thoughts become a "vulture" which "feeds upon" his "heart for ever." In contrast, Ishmael discovers the value of the heart. He has "intuitions of some things heavenly" which Ahab does not have, even if Ahab may well have, as Peleg says, "his humanities." The treasure of Ishmael's lower world experience is just this discovery of the wisdom of the heart. The heart symbolizes the inner world of love and harmony and truth. Peleg himself hints at his own awareness of the value of the inner world when he asks Ishmael, "'Can't ye see the world where you stand?'" Ishmael is "a little staggered" by this question. When a man understands himself, Peleg seems to imply, he knows where he stands in the world.

Peleg does not deceive Ishmael about the kind of experience he is heading for. "Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?" he asks him. Peleg's description of Ahab is highly evocative and directly to the point: "He's a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab: doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales." Peleg tells Ishmael of Ahab's recent loss of a leg, warning Ishmael never to make any allusions to the biblical Ahab in Ahab's presence. Ever since his accident, and even before, Ahab has been sensitive about the connections others have attempted to draw between the biblical Ahab and himself. The "old squaw Tistig, at Gay Head," for example, "said that the name would somehow prove prophetic." "It's a lie," Peleg says. He warns Ishmael on this matter especially because Ahab has been "desperate moody, and savage sometimes" ever since the loss of his leg. There is no telling what he might do, if incensed. Hence the two "old wise men," Peleg and Bildad, prepare Ishmael well for his whaling adventure. Peleg puts Ishmael down for the three-hundredth lay, a considerably better deal than Bildad would have given him. And Peleg and Bildad also make an exception to their rule of not hiring non-Christians by hiring Queequeg—though Tashtego and Daggoo hardly seem any more baptized than Queequeg, and they are hired too. But then Peleg is wise enough to know that "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish." The grand quest into the lower sea world is all ahead of Ishmael, now that he and Queequeg are both signed aboard the same ship. Ahead of Ishmael, too, is the shadowy dark figure of Ahab that Peleg has painted and, in dialectical contrast, the wild light image of a whale Ishmael has imagined, "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air."

The day Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod is a lively one, complete with strange shadows seen in the morning; an encounter with the mad prophet Elijah; and a brisk day's work under the lash of Peleg's tart tongue, "Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" The voyage is underway. Soon it is night, a cold Christmas night, but Ishmael has romantic hopes for the future. He sees "many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer." But now with adventurous soul and enthusiastic heart, Ishmael is to give himself up to "the abandonment of the time and the place." In the darkness, Bildad and Peleg, now the ship's pilots, depart, and as their boat diverges from the ship, "the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled"; then the crew "gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic." Ishmael descends into the lower world. The imagery of descent appears in the "plunge" the crew takes into the sea world. The descent is associated with peril and darkness, the demonic spell of fate, and the death struggle with the "pitiless" jaws of dragon whales.

Here a dramatic break in the narrative development occurs. A whole series of chapters organized to introduce the heroic characters of the Pequod's crew suddenly appears. This formal break is another modulation of the archetypal "break in consciousness." Melville here uses the convention radically in order to widen the scope of his work. In another sense, too, these chapters represent Ishmael's loss of identity. For here he identifies with these sea world heroes, and particularly with Ahab. The theme of the loss of identity, however, appears much more explicitly in the chapter just before Ahab's announcement of the hunt for Moby Dick. In "The Mast-head," Ishmael describes the loss of identity and the demonism of the sea. The sea casts the spell of death over many an unwary mariner. The more thoughtful the sailor, the more perilous the voyage. A sailor at the mast-head can be so lulled "by the blending of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity . . ." Ishmael's description of the loss of identity at this point in his narrative is a displacement of the romantic convention, which is just precisely that, as Frye describes it, the loss of identity. Ahab announces his quest, his speech charged with the demonic imagery of hatred, fire, devils, and death. As Ishmael says in "Moby Dick," he now loses his identity as he pledges himself to the hunt with the others: "I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine." Like Narcissus, Ishmael plunges into his lower world shadow. But Ishmael's shadow is Ahab.

The narrative break is a radical development of the romantic convention of the "break in consciousness." A better name for the use of the break here would thus be the formal break with convention in Moby-Dick. The narrative break is a formal analogy for the romantic "break in consciousness" because the whaling world Ishmael descends into breaks with "realistic" and romantic conventions by being a highly original mixture, or hybrid, as many critics have said, of both. The "Knights and Squires" chapters, for example are formal attempts at dispelling "realistic" illusions about the characters of the sea world. Sailors are not trifling men doing a smelly, dirty job to make a living. Ishmael takes a different perspective on the whalemen. The men Ishmael portrays are American heroes with "a thousand bold dashes of character." Ishmael's "reality" is romantic, not "realistic" in the conventional sense. To him the whalemen are indeed the knights and squires of the nineteenth century. But Melville has to work against commonly accepted assumptions about his subject matter, particularly because the literary tradition itself has had little to do with a romantic view of whalemen. Hence Ishmael supplies his book with extracts in order to show that the whale has had a place in the literary tradition with all the other dragons of literature from biblical times onward.

Melville described his artistic dilemma in a letter to Richard Dana: "It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this." Melville wants to get poetry out of "realistic" blubber. As he says, "blubber is blubber," from the point of view of "realism," and no more. It is a substance from which oil may be extracted. But to get poetry out of it, it has to be romanticized with "a little fancy." It is just this mixture of fact and fancy which forms the "truth" of experience for Melville, and the romantic "reality" of it. The "truth of the thing" is that shadowy, mythical area between the objective, scientific, or rational otherness of the thing and the subjective, irrational, or poetic perception of it.

A remarkable change in Melville's use of language accompanies the narrative break. This change also may be interpreted in terms of romantic convention. According to Frye, language in romance often has "a large amount of the antiquated in it, which helps to enclose a romance like a glass case in a verbal museum." Ahab speaks a "bold and nervous lofty language" which, according to Ishmael, is not an "unrealistic" way of speaking for many of the great Quaker sea captains. Hence Ahab's flowing, powerful rhetoric, like that of some displaced Hamlet or King Lear, heightens the romantic character of the action. Ahab's use of language is wonderfully strange and compelling. Even Starbuck has two major soliloquies among the kaleidoscope of forms Melville uses to portray his lower world drama. Moreover, Melville at times uses the actual stage directions of dramatic form itself. Hence Ahab's use of language is not the only example of Melville's development of the "special language" of romance in Moby-Dick. The lofty speech Ishmael uses himself is right in line with this convention, too. Ishmael uses the epic invocation, for example. He invokes the "great democratic God" to help him "ascribe high qualities" and to weave "tragic graces" around "meanest mariners." Ishmael thus uses language with great skill to evoke the dreamlike romantic atmosphere of the lower world, as he does so effectively, for example, in the companion chapters of "Moby Dick" and "The Whiteness of the Whale." The swarming images and long flowing sentences of these chapters have an analogy to the beginning of reverie in a troubled mind as it falls into the flowing unconsciousness of dream.

It has been argued that the first part of Moby-Dick develops the theme of descent into the romantic dream world. Central to the development of this theme is the motif of amnesia in which the hero loses his identity as he descends into the lower world. Ishmael suffers a "break in consciousness" before the work's opening. Hence he finds that he has no place in the land world. He is an alien, an exile, and an outcast in it. Melville develops the motif of amnesia into another symbolic "break in consciousness" as Ishmael descends from New York into the sea world. Ishmael enters a strange, new, and romantic whaling world. The transition he goes through, then, from his intense alienation in New York to his startlingly absorbed, fascinated, and excited state of mind in New Bedford completes the symbolic "break in consciousness" between the two levels of experience. Ishmael passes from the ordinary world into the romantic lower world, he loses his identity, and he finds himself attached to a strange lower world character, Queequeg, a symbol of all the unconscious mystery and wisdom of the lower world. The tattoos on Queequeg's body represent a modulation of the romantic device Frye calls the "talisman of recognition, some emblem or object, a birthmark on the body, tokens put beside an exposed infant, and the like, which symbolizes the original identity." Queequeg's tattoos present "a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth." They thus symbolize the true romantic heroism of Ishmael's quest for truth and wisdom in the sea world. Queequeg copies these tattoos onto the coffin which saves Ishmael's life. They thus play an important part in the archetypal recognition of Ishmael's heroic identity in the Epilogue.

In the first part of Moby-Dick, Melville immerses Ishmael in sea world associations by surrounding him with mirror symbols and images of the lower world. These mirror devices, like the Spouter-Inn oil painting or Father Mapple's sermon, cast their spell over Ishmael, and draw him on. But the sea world's spells and illusions are to become far more demonic once Ishmael actually enters into the experience of the hunt. Ishmael is to present the sea world with the romantic theme of conflict between appearance and "reality." The sea world can often appear to be beautiful and even soul calming, but in "reality" it is a demonic world of death and destruction. The "reality" of the sea world is thus for Ishmael that it is a place of intense alienation from others, of isolation within the self, and of tragic despair for the value of life itself. However, as he suffers through the tragic action of Ahab's plunge toward catastrophe, Ishmael is overwhelmed by a view of the dark side of existence, but this view is not the whole view. It is only an illusion of the whole. The idyllic world is a "reality" within the self, and potentially a "reality," too, in the social life of man. The task of finding this inner world is part of the struggle Ishmael faces in his descent. Ahab appears like the moon in a solar eclipse to cast his tragic shadow over Ishmael's identity and to block it out. Ishmael must struggle with this tragic shadow, and with the tragic view of existence it represents. The first part of Ishmael's quest into the lower world ends with Ishmael's loss of identity. The second part of his quest begins his death struggle with the dragon of the lower world. And for Ishmael this dragon is not so much Moby Dick as it is the tragic pessimism Ahab's quest for Moby Dick represents. At the end of the first part, then, the narrative splits into two quests; one Ahab's, the other Ishmael's.

## Chapter 3: The Tearing Apart of "Reality"

Polarization between heroes and villains is the central theme of the "pathos" or death struggle, the second stage of the romantic quest. The first narrative movement of Moby-Dick ends with the Pequod's embarkation. The action now progresses toward the death struggle with the White Whale. The remaining three narrative movements polarize around the two major characters. Ishmael dominates the satiric second movement, or the "cetological center," which runs from "The Lee Shore" through "Does the Whale Diminish?" Ahab dominates the third and fourth tragic movements. The third movement, from "Ahab's Leg" through "The Symphony," presents the action toward catastrophe. The three-day chase and Epilogue make up the fourth movement or finale. Ishmael and Ahab never do directly interact with each other throughout the entire story. The closest the two ever get to each other is when Ishmael becomes a member of Ahab's whaleboat crew for the final day of the chase. Melville is better able to idealize the two characters by separating them and by keeping their relationship distanced. The narrative split between the two characters then gives Melville the freedom and the structural breadth of scope to develop his themes encyclopedically.

In the "cetological center," Melville attempts to work out the conflict between the themes of fact and fancy, or between conventional "realism" and the kind of romantic "realism" he is aiming for. Romance, it has been said, is the most idealized form of literature. The opposite of romance is the mythos of irony and satire, which is the most unidealistic form. The romance is based upon the ritual quest which expresses identity and rebirth. Irony is based upon the opposite ritual of sparagmos, the tearing apart of the sacrificial victim. The dream content of romance is the wishfulfillment dream, whereas the dream content of irony is the nightmare. The mythos of irony and satire develops according to the structural principle Frye describes as the "parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways." The "cetological center" takes the form of a parody romantic quest into the whale's anatomy. In the parody quest, Ishmael uses satire to attack conventions of both romance and "realism" in order to develop Moby-Dick as a tale which partakes equally of both. The satire on romance can be seen in the way in which Ishmael ridicules, for example, conventional romantic heroes, such as kings, knights, and squires. He praises instead the unconventional heroism of his whalemen. At the same time, he assaults the far more intransigent bastion of conventional "realistic" assumptions about "reality." Melville thereby creates plausibility for both the supernaturalism and the evil of Moby Dick. He transforms "reality" into romance. The quest for the White Whale becomes, then, not the implausible fantasy of Ahab's madness, but the mere surface appearance of a far deeper and far more terrible metaphysical "reality."

Satire, Frye says, is irony which "assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured." In contrast, standards of pure irony cannot be measured. The ironic author's views are thus completely obscured by his irony. "Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral standard," Frye says, "the latter being essential in a militant attitude to experience." Satire is thus "militant irony" or irony which attacks one set of standards in favor of another. For Frye, one phase of satire attacks the "sources and values of conventions themselves." Melville uses social satire in this way. He makes fun of conventionally aristocratic romantic heroes. By doing so, he "rescues" the romance form for his whalemen from the aristocratic classes which have "kidnapped" it. Melville's idealized whalemen challenge conventional ideals of aristocratic heroism. Melville offers the alternative of democratic idealism. The first part of Moby-Dick develops the theme of social satire to prepare for the far more radical metaphysical satire of the "cetological center" where Ishmael descends into the grotesque anatomy of the whale to ridicule all rational ways of knowing "reality," from the most logical to the most commonsensical. He supports instead ideals of spiritual and intuitive ways of knowing.

Ishmael's task in the first part of Moby-Dick is to establish his characters, including himself, as plausible romantic heroes. In "The Advocate," he clearly states the problem he faces. As the "business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit," Ishmael is "all anxiety to convince" landsmen of the "injustice" this view has done to "hunters of whales." Ishmael approaches his problem with a sense of humor. As the gentle dupe of Peter Coffin's folk humor, Ishmael learns that "If any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for." In the first part of Moby-Dick, Ishmael reveals very much that is "bountifully laughable" about him.

But Ishmael is in a humorous predicament, too. The romantic writer without suitable heroic ideals to present must make himself a hero in quest of heroism. The humor of the situation is that Ishmael's romantic imagination should lead him to seek heroism in the hard lot of the fishery. He is in an ironic bind. At once highly intelligent and imaginative, he is also unfortunately poor. Secondly, he is furious with frustration in a materialistic land world that has no place for him, and no appreciation for him. Ishmael idealizes his reasons for going to sea. In place of suicide, he quietly takes to the ship, not as an aristocratic soldier or captain, but as a common seaman. In conventional romance, the heroes tend to be upper-class members of a landed aristocracy, as the romances of King Arthur and his court plainly show. But in Ishmael's romance, the heroes are democrats, the "selectest champions from the kingly commons."

As a hardy and energetic young gentleman with a lot of romantic notions about the whaling world, Ishmael finds himself descending the social scale into the rough ranks of lower-class laborers. He wants to work on no other than a Nantucket craft in order to get the full historical feeling for the industry. He wants little responsibility, plenty of time for meditation and spiritual pursuits, and all meals prepared. In the fishery, he gets all these things and, rather than having to pay anything for them, he gets paid to enjoy them. Ishmael's enthusiasm may seem tremendously naïve because romance conventions hardly find the whaling industry a suitable place for investing any ideals. The state of mind Ishmael depicts himself in at the beginning of his quest, all arush to escape his terribly depressed spirits on the voyage which is to be his "substitute for pistol and ball," also seems hardly compatible with ideals like these. But do what a man will, be it romancing whales or women, he has to make the best of his situation. If he is a knight he slays dragons and rescues damsels from distress. If he is a nineteenth-century outcast, he goes whaling and courts cannibals.

But everyone is "one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is: and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content." For Ishmael the sea world cures his gut revulsion for the materialistic land world, a revulsion which he later describes from the point of view of the "sunken-eyed young Platonist" who, much like himself at the beginning of his quest, goes to sea "disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber." Ishmael's disgust is with the social land world which frustrates and abuses him into taking such a "shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces." As these conventional forms offer him little means to idealize his experience, he has to change his perspective.

In his opening adventures, Ishmael's high heroic ideals and genteel habits and manners conflict with his experience. All the annoyances and troubles Ishmael faces make it difficult for him to get his grand romantic quest underway. The major function of the opening adventures is to get Ishmael genuinely initiated and involved in his romantic quest. Coffin initiates Ishmael well by making him the butt of the most humorous episode in Moby-Dick, the thumping late night introduction to cannibal Queequeg. Ishmael then begins to involve himself in the fascinating character of his experience, and he begins to cast off foolish prejudices and pretentious beliefs. He finds "Christian kindness" but "hollow courtesy," or empty ritual, in comparison with Queequeg's spontaneous generosity. Queequeg is truly virtuous. He saves an obnoxious "greenhorn" from drowning on the cruise from New Bedford to Nantucket, but finds it unnecessary "to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies."

Instead, Queequeg "seemed to be saying to himself—'It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians.'" Melville's satire on Christian virtue here follows up an important theme of his first two romances, Typee and Omoo: the hypocrisy of Christian missionaries in the South Seas. Melville makes the point as he imagines Queequeg would make it: "We cannibals must help these Christians."

By dedicating his satire to yanking all manner of social frauds off their high horses into the tar buckets, oil, sweat, blood, and blubber of the whaleman's world, Ishmael rescues the romance form for the American working class from the aristocratic knights who have traditionally dominated it. The grotesque fraud of authority given to kings incites Ishmael with a desire for pulling noses: "A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne." Then too, Ishmael listens quietly and respectfully to Father Mapple's sermon and the concluding exhortation that one kill, burn, and destroy "all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges." Ishmael dumps buckets of hot, steaming satiric tar over such immaculate American images as "riotous" lads out of "Yale or Harvard," ridiculous kings of England whose heads get anointed, as heads of lettuce, with spermaceti oil, and all the absurd knights and squires whose virtue is mere artifice of class and not true strength of character.

Social satire runs all through Moby-Dick. It is not limited to the first part alone. Ishmael does, however, intensify his irony to develop a more radical level of social satire further on, one which will enable him to develop the theme that "there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men." Ishmael even ridicules conventions in the fishery itself. The seating and eating order of the cabin table is a circus of absurdity. Equally amusing is the convention of the gam in which the captain must stand during his whaleboat ride from one ship to another even if to do so he often has to "seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death." Sea captains, however, are not the only characters guilty of such social foolishness. The genteel world is full of it, and Ishmael mocks this mannerly world by immersing it in sea world associations. His method consists of drawing out analogies between the habits of whales and the social life of men: "As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love." The duel, of course, is a genteel convention, unlike the sudden brutal fistfights, knifings, or murders whalemen engage in when the motive is sheer instinctive malice, as it is for Radney and Steelkilt of "The Town Ho's Story." Ishmael associates genteel love with sexual prudery. All whales bed in common and men might take the hint. Ishmael mocks the old hypocrite whale who after disbanding his own harem goes off "all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors."

Ishmael expresses his anger and frustration with conventional social "reality" in more subtle ways by making the hardships of the sea world humorous. He thus exposes genteel callousness toward the kind of annoying hardship mariners suffer as a way of life—such as mutilation and death. Shop signs of oil-dealers present an amusing view of the mariner's misery with pictures of whales breakfasting upon "three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint." Life in the sea world is a long way from life in an earthly paradise, and getting to heaven for mariners means getting there the hard way, which, as Stubb explains to the Cook, is "the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a ticklish business, but must be done, or else it's no go." Besides all the hazards of drowning or mutilation the whalemen face when hunting whales from their fragile boats, they stand no inconsiderable risk, during the course of their tamer duties, of falling or being swept overboard into the maws of sharks, jaws of whales, or arms of squid. Even men working in the blubber room are not safe, as they slip and slide atop the blubber they cut from under their bare feet with razor-sharp spades. "Toes are scarce among veteran blubber room men," Ishmael notes. Queequeg has the most perilous job on the whaler. During the cutting in, his duty is to stand on the dead whale, and hook slabs of blubber to the hauling tackles. As the whale bobs and rolls in the sea, Queequeg, floundering about on the half-submerged whale, might well choose either to be crushed between the ship and the whale or to be torn to pieces by the sharks.

The shift from social to metaphysical satire accompanies the start of the cetological quest. Ishmael's adventures in New York, New Bedford, and Nantucket, the first stage of his quest, come to an end, and, as the voyage begins, the second stage, the death struggle, begins along with it. At this point in Moby-Dick, Ishmael, the character, largely withdraws from the action into the retrospective narrator who promptly launches into an intensive, even monomaniacal, cetological quest for the meaning of "reality." The structural split into two quests explains why Ishmael falls into the background of the main action, as Ahab appears more and more to dominate it. This structural split is a modulation of the romantic theme of descent into the reflecting pool. Ishmael, the character, disappears into his own mirror image, or into Ahab, the symbol of that image, the way Narcissus does into his.

The ritual sparagmos shows up in the first part of Moby-Dick in the theme of cannibalism. Queequeg is a cannibal, and Ishmael learns to respect and admire him. Ahab, as Peleg tells Ishmael, has "been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals," and Ishmael feels a "wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling for him. "Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?" Ishmael asks. He himself is a "savage," whose only allegiance is to the "King of the Cannibals." The tearing apart of the conventional romantic notion of heroism, then, appears in this cannibalistic aspect of the heroes, cannibalism being a conventional theme of irony and satire. The sparagmos, however, becomes the structural principle for the form of the cetological quest. The cetological quest forms around the anatomical dissection or tearing apart of the whale. On the cetological quest, Ishmael proceeds to develop the theme of cannibalism encyclopedically and to give it universal dimensions, as can be seen in the imagery of the "universal cannibalism of the sea" and its land parallel, the "horrible vulturism of earth." This theme of cannibalism raises questions in Ishmael's mind about the power of evil in the metaphysical world. Knowledge of the universality of evil both in nature and in the soul of humanity forms the dark standard against which all attempts to understand human experience must be measured.

The cetological quest develops as a satiric descent into and return from the whale's anatomy. The first stage of the cetological descent begins with a modulation of the romantic motif of amnesia. The companion chapters, "Moby Dick" and "The Whiteness of the Whale," together form a summary and analysis of the major themes of the entire work. They form the cetological quest's parody of the romantic "break in consciousness." The element of parody appears in the way Ishmael creates the dreamlike atmosphere which conventionally follows such a break with the extraordinary associative or symbolistic intensity of his thought. The concept of satire as the parody of romance does not necessarily mean that the parody will take a humorous form. Parody can be a deadly serious imitation for the purpose of showing how different the "real" world can be from some romantic notion of it, for instance. In Ishmael's case, the "break in consciousness" here is "realistic" because it is psychologically induced—not by some magician's spell, but by Ishmael's own intense thinking. The break here clearly differs from the earlier romantic one he experiences when he falls asleep with Queequeg and wakes up to find himself in the magical, romantic world the next day.

In contrast to the loss of identity Ishmael, the character, experiences as he begins to identify with Queequeg, then with Ahab, the narrator rigorously separates his identity from Ahab's by presenting what the White Whale means to Ahab and other sailors, himself at times included, in "Moby Dick," and then by presenting what the whale has more often meant to himself in "The Whiteness of the Whale." Ishmael emphasizes the difference between the two views at the beginning of "The Whiteness of the Whale," when he says: "What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid." The narrator's quest begins from a confident retrospective point of view. Having successfully completed the romantic quest, Ishmael attempts to go back over his experience and to show not only how similar his view of the whale has been to Ahab's, but also how it has come to differ. The two chapters, "Moby Dick" and "The Whiteness of the Whale" show in microcosm the strong resemblances and near identity between Ahab's view of Moby Dick and Ishmael's. In both chapters, Ishmael uses an associative technique to concentrate a pattern of imagery around the theme of the fabulous character of Moby Dick and of the sea world experience itself. Ishmael thus attempts to make the sea world experience "feelingly" comprehensible as it is for the men who experience it first-hand. The sea world experience does not consist of facts alone, and few actual facts exist about Moby Dick. The facts them-selves are unusual.

In "Moby Dick," Ishmael presents the common seaman's view of the White Whale as the dark foil for Ahab's lustrous, mad one. Although Ishmael claims that whalemen are ignorant and superstitious, he yet counters the negativity of this observation by giving them adequate reasons for their greatest fears. Whalemen are "by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them." The whalemen base their superstitions on actual experience, on intuitions, feelings, facts, and any other "influences" there may be. Superstitions are partly rational, partly irrational, partly emotional and intuitive beliefs, inferences, attitudes, and opinions about "reality" which the so-called truth, were it known, would falsify. But the superstitions of the fishery are all supported by the facts so that "fabulous narrations" of mythical wonders, such as that of the mythical Arethusa fountain, "are almost fully equaled by the realities of the whalemen." Moby Dick is one creature whose identity eludes simple classification as a sperm whale. He is the archetypal dragon, but in the inscrutable and untold form of a White Whale. For Ahab this whale symbolizes universal evil: "All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick."

In "The Whiteness of the Whale," Ishmael shows that both he and Ahab see Moby Dick in much the same way. For Ishmael, as for Ahab, there is no adequate religious, scientific, or philosophical way of understanding Moby Dick. Ishmael negates conventional "realistic" meanings by opposing them with a mass of unconventional associations. These unconventional associations then work together indirectly, not by assertion, but by the force of their symbolic consistency, to make the metaphysical riddles the White Whale evokes the central focus of meaning. Ishmael negates "reality" by negating conventional views of "reality" with their opposites. "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me," Ishmael says. "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught." The whiteness of the whale represents a complete reversal of the conventional romantic imagery of light heroes and dark villains. In the color of whiteness, Ishmael discovers a symbol of the universality of evil in nature.

For Ishmael, factual or scientific explanations of the different parts of experience do not explain the wondrous complexity of the whole. Ishmael amasses mythical lore, scientific evidence, and national and religious symbolism to justify his intuitive fears of Moby Dick. For every conventional association attributed to whiteness, Ishmael counters with a series of negations. Whiteness is the color of the corpse, and, for an anti-conventional religious standpoint, it thus looks to him as much like "the badge of consternation in the other world" as it does like one of "mortal trepidation here." All ghosts rise "in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse." These associations counter common, conventional notions of the "supernaturalism of this hue." Whiteness may be, for example, the color of the "very veil of the Christian's Deity," but it is also the color of the starry heavens, the "heartless voids and immensities of the universe" which inspire in Ishmael "the thought of annihilation."

As he says at one point, beyond all the "accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood." And at another: "Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul." The tearing apart of the conventional meanings associated with whiteness is the structural principle behind Ishmael's associative technique of negating "reality." Among the many counter conventional associations Ishmael offers to create this effect are: the polar bear, white shark, and wild white stallion of the American west; the Albino man, the pallor of the corpse, the hue of the ghost, and the "tall pale man" of Central European fairy tales; and the white corrupt city of Lima, polar ice caps, and snow-capped Andes. In each of these images there is an aspect of destructiveness, a hint of perversion, or an element of nightmare.

Ishmael, too, intuitively grasps, as Ahab does, the universal nature of evil. He gives an example to show what he means. Even if a colt were raised in the gentlest pastures, remote to all predators or natural enemies, yet a buffalo robe rustled behind him will still send that colt into "phrensies of affright." As the buffalo robe betrays to the colt, so whiteness betrays to Ishmael "the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world." Ishmael's instinctive fears are not merely privative or personal—the definition of evil offered by Emerson and other transcendentalists—but universal. The demonic principle is pervasive throughout nature: "Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!" Ishmael intuitively perceives evil "things" in nature, and he feels that "as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist." The anthropomorphic systems of thought man uses to understand the universe may well be but "colored and coloring glasses" through which the meaningless blank of the universe may be viewed. Nature deceives. It may at times be outwardly beautiful, but it may also hide "nothing but the charnel-house within." The color contains associations with good and evil as does nature itself. But both nature and whiteness make good and evil, appearance and "reality," seem one. This symbolic deceptiveness makes the White Whale as inscrutably evil for Ishmael as for Ahab.

Ishmael's descent into the whale's anatomy brings him to parody modulations of mirror images. The mirror images, such as the Spouter-Inn oil-painting, Ishmael meets in his opening adventures are modulations of the romantic convention. They exert a magical charm over Ishmael's imagination and cast the dreamlike spell of the lower world over him. But in chapters on "monstrous Pictures of Whales," "Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales," and "Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, &c," Ishmael sets out to show that many of these representations are "pictorial delusions." He clearly distinguishes the good from the bad paintings, for example. He is thus in full control of himself, and able to exercise good judgment, this ability being the opposite of the lack of control one experiences when under a dreamlike spell. From this point on the descent follows the process of capturing the whale, cutting him up, analyzing his parts from head to tail, trying him out, and finally measuring his skeleton. And from the structural framework this anatomy provides him, Ishmael launches a siege of metaphysical satire against the conventions of "reality."

In a similar manner to the way in which he creates an impression of inscrutable evil in nature by concentrating upon the deceptiveness of whiteness, Ishmael as forcefully develops the imagery of the brutal deceptiveness, destructiveness, and demonism of the sea. The sea "lulls" sailors at their mast-head watches into feelings of transcendental union with nature. But the union is illusory. As if under a demonic spell, the sailor might well lose his balance, and find himself plummeting to his death. Around the Cape of Good Hope, the sea looks like a hell in which "guilty beings" seem "condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon." In the sea, the "most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure." Its destructive "heartless immensity" has the power of driving a man mad, as it does Pip and Ahab. The sea is a Hades of anxiety, madness, and death where "millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness." At times the sea's beauty creates an illusion of the land so that the waves appear but "blue hill-sides" where "you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping" as if "in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked." The sea deludes with its beauty, so that "when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang." The false paradise deceives, and without apparent reason stands an infernal mystery and ironic taunting threat to man forever. While in the sky glide the birds that form the "gentle thoughts of the feminine air," in the sea, "to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue," rush "mighty leviathans, sword-fish and sharks" which form the "strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea." The sea and the sky lock all creation together in one lustful embrace, as between the sea and the sky, "it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them." Ishmael's imagery consistently portrays the sea as actively malignant and inscrutably evil. It lulls, condemns, and drowns, conceals, deceives, and destroys. It even thinks thoughts of murder.

To develop the universality of this demonic mystery further, Ishmael significantly associates the demonic sea with the inner nature of man. Within the innermost soul of man is an idyllic Tahiti surrounded by the "universal cannibalism of the sea": "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life." The "half known life" which surrounds the inmost self completes the analogy Ishmael establishes between the "green, gentle, and most docile earth" and the "universal cannibalism of the sea" which surrounds it. There is thus within the very nature of man an intrinsic element of evil, a cannibalistic sea of consciousness, which surrounds the island of truth and beauty within the soul. The evil element in man's soul shows up in Queequeg's cannibalism, Ishmael's savagery, and Ahab's madness. It cannot be rationally accounted for. Nor can it be explained away.

The social analogy for the image of the "universal cannibalism of the sea" is the "horrible vulturism of earth." Upon the banquet of a whale's funeral, nature's carnivorous mocking feast on the corpse, sharks do "most piously pounce' the way hypocrites will pounce upon inheritance, Ishmael would seem to suggest, come time for a funeral: "There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled." Ishmael parodies the funeral to expose the ritual honoring of the dead with corruption and hypocrisy. He mocks the romantic ideal of honorable death. Death, mortality, for Ishmael, is an evil injustice inflicted upon humanity by the gods, as is also the impulse to slaughter in the name of honor. Ishmael associates the romantic ritual of warfare with the symbol of the most profound evil of the cannibalistic sea, the shark. Just as people will "cannibally" cut away each other's "live meat" with "carving knives all gilded and tasseled," so the sharks "with their jewel hilted mouths" will carve away at the dead meat of a whale. The same principle of evil governs both human and beast, for "were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties." The demonic principle penetrates into the innermost heart of all creation: into nature, into society, and into the individual. Perceiving this demonic principle as he does, Ishmael is thus able to understand Ahab's monomaniacal desire to destroy the symbol, and possibly the source too, of "all evil."

The word satire comes from the Latin word, satura, which Frye translates as "hash." As part of his satire on conventional mythology, Christian, Classical, and Eastern, Ishmael serves up a hash of mythological allusions for his two main characters, whose names are biblical allusions themselves. Melville does not parallel the development of either Ahab or Ishmael with their biblical counterparts in any systematic way. There is hardly enough to the myth of Ishmael for this kind of development any way. An "angel of the Lord" describes Ishmael as follows: "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren." Ishmael becomes a mocker and an outcast. Because he is a mocker, he is thrown out of Abraham's house with his mother. The two then wander in the "wilderness." In Moby-Dick, Ishmael is a mocker as a satirist. He makes himself a self-elected exile from the land world. The biblical Ishmael's wandering in the wilderness is typologically identical with a descent to a lower world. That he will one day gain a "great nation" of descendants is typologically identical with an ascent to an idyllic world. Melville's Ishmael descends into the sea world, and ascends to an idyllic "Tahiti" within his soul. The biblical Ahab is a king of Israel who turns idolator. God arranges an ignoble death for him. After Ahab dies, dogs lick his blood. This humiliation is a biblical modulation of the ritual sparagmos or tearing to pieces of the ironic hero. Melville mutilates and kills Ahab perhaps in part because Ahab idolizes his quest. Ahab dies ignobly as his biblical counterpart does. He gets caught in a turn of the whale line, and dragged to his doom: not a picturesque death by any means. The presumption is that the sharks, like the dogs in the myth, will indeed lick Ahab's blood.

Melville makes a hash of mythological allusions by associating Ishmael with, among others, Lazarus, Jonah, Theseus, Ixion, and Narcissus; Ahab, with Job, Christ, and Prometheus. Both Ahab and Ishmael are members of the whaleman's club, a collection of mythological figures Ishmael mockingly jumbles together in his chapter on "The Honor and Glory of Whaling": "Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?" All this hashing together of different mythologies according to similarities in archetypal form contributes to Ishmael's satire on dogmatic, religious interpretations of myth. From a historical perspective, the Jonah myth is of doubtful verity. Ishmael presents his case against the historic truth of this story in "Jonah Historically Regarded." Ishmael's victim is conventional Christianity. He notes that even "skeptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin," just as he himself doubts the historical truth of the Jonah myth. Ishmael substitutes a hypothetical villain, "old Sag-Harbor," for his own skeptical view while he ironically takes an accusatory, Christian point of view. Sag-Harbor wins the contest. No one mythology offers a guidebook to experience, nor does any one myth solve the metaphysical mysteries of life by enrolling successful questers in clubs of the saved and damned.

Traditional wisdom, supposedly handed down or inspired in man by gods, offers little instruction when taken literally. In Ishmael's mind, and Ahab's too, the rational equivalent of mythical dogmatism, namely, systematic philosophy, fails to make the human condition palatable. The one philosophy with which both Ahab and Ishmael show some agreement is the unsystematically systematic philosophy of transcendentalism. Ahab presents several markedly accurate interpretations of the transcendentalist's theory of correspondence between natural and spiritual facts. For Ahab "not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." In "The Doubloon," he says that man but sees the externalization of his inner soul in nature's symbolism. The doubloon "is but the image of the round globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self." But Ahab intuits evil, not the transcendentalist's good, in nature. Ishmael often makes use of what might be called the transcendentalist's literary technique of using analogies to show the correspondences between nature and the spirit. But even Ishmael mocks his own method when he parodies Emersonian oracular oratory: "Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! . . . Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own." The transcendentalist's universal truths often sound just this ludicrous.

Ishmael ridicules systematic philosophy by turning some of the most famous philosophers into parody villains. He associates Plato with the death of an Ohio honey hunter. In the same way that this hunter perishes by falling into a beehive, so can a man perish intellectually by drowning in the systematic sweetness of Plato's "honey head." Systematic thought has its value, but it loses its value when it takes one form that excludes the value of all others. When a whale's head hangs from only one side of the ship, an imbalance is created which can only be righted by the addition of another whale's head to the other side. By observing this natural balancing process, Ishmael learns that "when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight." Locke and Kant, philosophical leaders of the ages of reason and romanticism, respectively balance one against the other, and hence but cancel each other out. Hence Ishmael: "Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right."

After throwing philosophy overboard, Ishmael manhandles science into the leviathan's jaws. Ishmael wants his tale to maintain "realistic" plausibility. The whale does have the battering ram power, he points out, to stove in and sink a large ship. In several instances, this calamity has in fact occurred. The whale is enormous. In his tail alone lurks a "Titanism of power." All these facts help to make the Pequod's catastrophe believable. Then too, Ahab's knowledge of the hunting grounds makes the quest enter even more believable waters. Night after night Ahab pours over his "yellowish sea charts" and the migratory routes of whales mapped out on them. He has "piles of old log books" in which the seasons and sightings of whale killings have been recorded. By considering all the times, places, and occasions where Moby Dick has been seen, and plotting these, Ahab considerably increases his chances of finding Moby Dick.

Neither Ishmael nor Ahab argues with the value of science as a means to an end. Science is valuable to Ahab, but it is not valuable to him as an end in itself. Any form of knowledge can become an end in itself if it loses sight of the whole of human experience and of the value of the whole. Ahab smashes the ships quadrant to dramatize his spiritual supremacy over the inhuman gadgetry of science: "Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun!" Science has no value in and of itself, though many scientists would seem to lose sight of this fact, as if science were to become a separate deity to be worshipped along with the rest. Scientific knowledge can lead to the betterment of earthly life, but it cannot solve the metaphysical mysteries of life. Ahab will always be Ahab, and as Ahab is mortal, Ahab must suffer and die. The sphere of science is the physical universe, Ahab's conflict is with the metaphysical.

The scientific fact that whales swim in veins might be given the scientific term, instinct, but what is instinct? Ishmael's answer is, "say, rather secret intelligence from the Deity." Scientific facts help to clear the world of many superstitions, but the large metaphysical questions remain unsolved. Ishmael uses scientific evidence to mutilate false beliefs and crank theories, as when he ridicules the traditions and orthodoxy which arise when, for example, a dead whale is mistaken for a hazardous area at sea. The place gets marked down in the ship's log as a dangerous place to be ever afterwards avoided: "There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed in the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!" In contrast Ishmael confronts the full mystery of "reality" with an open, scientific mind. When he faces the question of whether the whale's spout is water or mist, he refuses to jump to any quick conclusions, or merely to give in to common sense. Addressing a hypothetical critic of his open mindedness, a parody villain, Ishmael states: "My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely." Ishmael concludes that the spout is "nothing but mist." He then counters this claim with a fantastic explanation to show his contempt for even common sense. Whale mist is the kind of mist which rises from the heads of "ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho. The Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on," when they are "in the act of thinking deep thoughts."

Neither reason nor common sense can close the gap between self-knowledge and scientific facts. The two pseudosciences, phrenology and physiognomy, dedicated to closing this gap, fail miserably: "Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable." So a highly learned man like Sir William Jones may be able to read in thirty different languages and yet be unable to "read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings." The true metaphysical meaning of experience is an ever elusive, ever receding mystery before the grasping hand of science. And "however baby man may brag of his science and skill," Ishmael says, "to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make." Like blubber, scientific knowledge and technology get minced up, tried out, kegged up in casks, and battened down into the Pequod's hold: which is to say that science does have some practical value, however deficient in meaning it might be. Call a whale what people will, they only make him remotely intelligible through the highly inadequate form of communication which is the human language, scientific or otherwise. Then too, human perception is not powerful enough to see the "clear Truth" of "reality." For, as Ishmael says, "clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter." When the mind is strong enough to perceive even the faintest glimmerings of this "clear Truth," as Pip's and Ahab's are, then the result is madness. The parody death struggle of the cetological quest ends with the death of rational knowledge: "Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face." Thus the faceless universe presents no recognizable apparition to man's understanding, but it does present the dread, archetypal dragon of evil and death, the White Whale, Moby Dick.

The quest remains an ironic struggle with apparent meaninglessness from beginning to end. The mortal, materialistic aspect of the quest leads nowhere: "Only through numberless perils into the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us." The larger, metaphysical quest has to end in failure, as "in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed." Yet the desire to live and to quest through all the immense ironies of evil, death, and human limitations of every kind that make all existence seem at times absurd, at times a "vast practical joke," compels the soul's search from one world of experience to the next, and as "the ghost is spouted up" at last, then "away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again." Ultimately for Ishmael, as for Ahab, the "secret" of humanity's "paternity lies in the grave," and we "must there to learn it." That tormenting secret, and all the mortal woes and sorrows, all the ironic evils that humiliate and mock the dignity of humankind are "practically assailable" for Ahab and "feelingly" comprehensible for Ishmael in the White Whale.

The parody rebirth or final stage of the quest pattern occurs in the series of chapters which ends the cetological center: "A Bower in the Arsacides," "Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton," "The Fossil Whale," and finally, "Does the Whale Diminish?" These chapters contain a wealth of parody rebirth imagery, which succeeds only in immortalizing the metaphysical riddles the whale raises in Ishmael's mind. In "A Bower in the Arsacides," a "cub sperm whale" appears. Ishmael confesses that much of his knowledge of the whale's inner mysteries has come, unlike Jonah's, from his having "been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature." The imagery of the bower of bliss or Garden of Eden, conventionally associated with romantic rebirth and with the idyllic world, appears abundantly here. But despite all the supportive imagery, no rebirth of meaning occurs from the symbolic tearing apart of "reality." All the riddles are reborn whole in the baby sperm whale.

Ishmael associates himself with Jonah and with Theseus, too, in this chapter, both successful quester archetypes. Ishmael, as if he were Theseus, wanders "with a ball of Arsicidean twine" into the whale bower and out again. But Ishmael's cetological quest fails: "naught was there but bones." Ishmael is able to measure the whale's skeleton, but he can only describe the true mystery of his experience with an irrational, poetic expression: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories." The "curly-headed glories" born to the union of Life and Death here attest to the hopeful beauty of Life even amidst the ruins of Death. But there is no rational or acceptable conventional way for Ishmael to explain his meaning other than the poetic. The riddles remain.

In the "Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton," the setting is still the false bower. The bower framed by the whale's skeleton is merely an illusion of beauty and truth. For the "real" whale is also the live whale, just as the "real" truth of life is both the good and evil of it, not only the pleasant calms, but the storms also: "Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out." The measurements help Ishmael to understand the true awesome nature of the living whale very little. The poetic sentiment of the earlier chapter dispels. But the cruel "reality" of the sea world remains forever. An image of innocent children appears at the end of the chapter. These children, "little cannibal urchins," or parody rebirth images, steal the whale's smaller vertebrae to play marbles. Thus, Ishmael says, "the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play," or stated another way, into the ongoing irony of human life and death.

These last chapters parody the pattern of the romantic ascent's three archetypal stages of development, which are, as Frye describes them: recognition, separation from the demonic, and restoration of memory. The chapter, "A Bower in the Arsacides," presents the imagery of recognition. In the whale bower, Ishmael finds the meaning he has sought during his cetological quest. His discovery of this meaning is a modulation of the recognition. Ishmael discovers a strange, supportive relation between Life and Death, but he cannot explain what he sees in any rational way. The images of Jonah and Theseus ascending out of lower worlds in this chapter are also recognition images. Ishmael associates the completion of his cetological quest with their mythical heroism. A parody of the conventional romantic second stage of ascent, the separation from the demonic, occurs in "The Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton." Ishmael states flatly that the true whale can only be known in the "quickest perils" of his "angry flukes." Hence the whale may appear beautiful and good in the whale bower just as life itself may for moments, but the demonic principle the whale embodies lives on in the sea world and also in the human condition itself, in the sea world within the soul of man. Evil cannot be escaped. There can be no separation from the demonic principle in this life.

The final romantic stage of ascent takes the form of a restoration of the hero's memory. After completing his quest, he is able to look back and reinterpret it with his new, reborn understanding. The parodying of this final stage occurs in the last two cetological chapters: "The Fossil Whale" and "Does the Whale Diminish?" In "The Fossil Whale," Ishmael combines social and metaphysical satire in one grand satiric vision of his work, an outburst of narrative exuberance which corresponds only to the similar outburst, "O Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" with which he begins his cetological quest. Ishmael now turns in triumph to look back at the ruins of "reality" he has left behind him: "Give me a Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs." Amidst the ruins of the ages, the fossils and wonder of nature throughout the geological epochs and ages of the earth from the time when the entire terraqueous globe was covered with water, and, beyond the failures of conventional ways of thinking, the failures of philosophy, of religion, of science, to come to terms with a "Whaling Voyage bv One Ishmael," Ishmael stands proudly on the ageless Eden of his humanity, and the wisdom of his thought passes understanding.

Ishmael scornfully leaves the reader to worship in an "Afric Temple of the Whale," another false bower, this one ending "The Fossil Whale." The ancient fossil remains which Ishmael considers in "Does the Whale Diminish?" are evidence that the whale's magnitude has increased through time. The whale shows every sign of continuing to increase also in number and in strength. The whale existed before humanity ever tread the earth, and in all probability, the whale should exist long after humanity has passed away from the earth entirely. The whale is "immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality," his immortality, a parody rebirth with a vengeance. The whale will "spout his frothed defiance to the skies" forever. But behind the entire cetological quest and its mockery of humanity's efforts to overcome the obstacles of ignorance and evil throughout the vast panorama and spectacle of human history, stands the universe of human feeling, human thought, and human dreams of Ishmael. And the counter irony Ishmael sets against an ironic life mocked by the riddling injustice of death and by the alien and indifferently hostile universe is the romantic vision of the ideal world within the soul of man where all may live in peace and harmony. "The principle of the aristocracies of the past was respect for birth," Frye says; "The principle of fraternity in the ideal world of romance is respect rather for those who have been born, and because they have been born."

The theme of social satire in the first part of Ishmael's romantic quest prepares for the later dramatic split of the narrative into the cetological and narrative quests. By satirizing aristocratic and genteel ideals of heroism not founded upon true virtue, but upon the false standards of class or belief, Ishmael begins the process of "rescuing" the romance from the aristocratic knights and squires conventionally associated with it. Ishmael's heroic ideals maintain the high abstraction necessary to the romance form. He conceives of heroism on a truly universal level. The natural heroism of humanity springs from the inner "democratic dignity" of the soul. All social conventions which fail to appreciate or recognize the value of individuals, no matter what their social status, have no value themselves. Social masks are but expedient forms not to be abused by being valued over and above the human beings who wear them, and not to be used to conceal motives or purposes they have not been designed to serve, such as personal gain through the mask of religious belief or social advantage through racial or class prejudice. All social conventions that stifle imagination with orthodoxy or mislead intelligence with blind tradition create barriers between people that promote only ignorance, fear, and injustice. Ishmael condemns disrespect for the inner feelings and unique intuitions of the individual caused by senseless rituals, absurd laws, and inhuman ideals that frustrate emotional and intellectual independence and fraternity among people and that fail to recognize and value the true potential and complexity of the human spirit.

Ishmael launches into a cetological quest specifically designed to accomplish the difficult task of creating romantic plausibility for a "realistic" tale. The cetological quest is based on the ritual pattern of the tearing to pieces of the sacrificial whale. The quest takes the form of a parody descent and return from the world of conventional knowledge: mythical, religious, philosophic, and scientific. Ishmael begins his quest by creating a mock scientific system for classifying whales. He then proceeds to examine the grossly inaccurate pictorial representations of them, which are modulations of romantic mirror images in parody form. Ishmael then descends into the second stage of conflict and death struggle. In this stage of his quest, he creates a polarized romantic lower world of conflict and alienation by making mock victims and villains of ways of thinking and believing and of people commonly associated with them. His gradual dissection of the whale is an extended parody of the romantic death struggle. Ishmael tears apart the "reality" of the whale and the "reality" of the physical universe with it until he gets to the nothingness within them both. He finally rejects all rational means of understanding the metaphysical meaning of the whale or of life itself. The final stage presents a parody rebirth in which all three archetypal stages of romantic rebirth occur, but without a corresponding rebirth of reason.

Both Ahab and Ishmael perceive life's mysteries in romantic terms. They both conceive of an inscrutably malignant power of evil which, if not dominant in the natural world, yet strives for dominance through the demonic principle which penetrates through nature into the very nature of humanity. They similarly conceive of this demonic principle, and of cosmic mystery itself, as cosmic injustice. Ahab and Ishmael are thematic doubles or doppelganger figures. The structural split in the narrative at the cetological center enables Melville to develop this double theme and to maintain the overall romantic structure of the work as a whole. By keeping Ishmael and Ahab apart, he can mirror them and still concentrate on intensifying Ahab into a tragic hero. With Ishmael's parody quest, Melville tears apart "reality" to give his story the marvelous dimension proper to romance and the ironic mystery necessary for tragedy.

## Chapter 4: The Death Struggle

One side of the narrative split at the cetological center of Moby-Dick, the satiric side, follows the pattern of a parody quest down into the anatomy of the whale and out again. The other side, Ahab's tragedy, develops according to the structural principle of the breaking, not the parody, of romantic archetypes. Melville uses the romantic archetype, but he breaks it off, and then goes on to develop the action with archetypes of tragedy. This principle can be seen at work in the way Ishmael's quest breaks off, and Ahab's takes over. Ahab's hybris, the tragic state of mind which, according to Frye, "brings about a morally intelligible downfall," takes the form of monomania. Ahab's moral downfall, his hamartia or tragic flaw, shows up in his sultanism, the immoral means he contrives to command the quest, and in his purpose, the immoral aim he conceives to guide it. Ahab attempts to break the balance between good and evil in the romantic lower world of nature by attempting to destroy what is for him the symbol of all evil in it. He thus sets off the tragic process of nemesis, nature's inscrutable process of righting the balance. Melville presents the tragic movement toward catastrophe from "Ahab's Leg" through "The Symphony." He presents the finale or final movement, the catastrophe itself, in the three-day chase.

The ritual basis of the romance is the quest. The three-part quest pattern imitates the yearly revolution of the seasons from the death of vegetation during the wasteland period of the year in the fall and winter to the fertility and fructification of the land in spring and summer. The ritual basis of tragedy is the sacrifice. In ritual terms, tragedy, the mythos of autumn, imitates the fall of the seasons from the grandeur of summer to the death of vegetation in winter, just before the majestic, dawning return of spring. The dream content of romance is the dream of wishfulfillment which keeps the successful return of the hero in clear moral perspective throughout his descent and return from the night world, while the dream content of tragedy is the dream of omnipotence in which the hero, by upsetting the moral balance in nature, starts off an irreversible process toward catastrophe. The double or doppelganger theme provides Melville with the transition from the one archetypal structure to the other. The conventional end of the hero's double is death or separation. If the double dies, his death can be seen as a sacrificial substitution for the hero's—Redburn's double, Harry Bolton, meets with this end. The structural split enables Melville to develop Ahab's already potentially tragic character as a romantic double figure into that of a genuine tragic hero by giving Melville the freedom to concentrate on Ahab as an individual character. Melville then raises a secondary archetypal role of romance into the central role of a tragic movement.

The cetological material strengthens the resemblances between Ahab and Ishmael, but the two characters are also importantly different in identity. Ahab's true archetypal identity is a mixture of the romantic Fisher King and the tragic figures of Job and Prometheus. In the medieval grail romances, the Fisher King figure is impotent and incapacitated by a sickness or leg wound. This wound symbolizes his sterility, and it reflects the ancient, magical connection between the king and his land. His land has become a wasteland. When the quester happens upon him, the Fisher King is fishing in a stream—hence, according to some theories, the name Fisher King—at which point the Fisher King invites the quester to his castle. He reveals the grail and bleeding lance to the quester there. However, the mystery of these symbols is not solved unless the quester asks the correct question, which can be as simple as whether or not the objects the quester sees are in fact the grail and lance he seeks; the answer to the mystery can be as simple as a "yes" reply. The Fisher King cannot be cured until the quest is successfully completed, and the successfully completed quest both heals the king and returns the fertility to his land. The Fisher King is the guardian of the mysteries of the grail and lance. According to some theories, the grail symbolizes the grail Christ used at the last supper; the bleeding lance, the lance with which Christ's side was pierced during the crucifixion. But, ac-cording to Jessie Weston, the grail and lance are ancient fertility symbols. Hence, according to both Weston and Frye, the lance and grail have an analogy to male and female genital organs. In ritual terms, the romance thus presents the "victory of fertility over the wasteland." Thus the knights in quest of the lance and grail are in quest of the fertility that the union of male and female symbolizes.

Ahab suffers a leg wound in his first struggle with Moby Dick; the whale dismembers his leg from the knee down. The suffering this dismemberment causes Ahab drives him mad. Along with the psychological impotence associated with this wound, or, put another way, the inability to live in harmony with others brought upon him by this alienating madness, Ahab's leg wound is explicitly associated with near castration. Just prior to the Pequod's voyage, Ahab is mysteriously discovered unconscious one night, "his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin." For all the suffering this wound causes Ahab, he is able to overcome it on his own, unlike the Fisher King, by the Promethean strength of his will. Like the Fisher King, Ahab too presides over the mysteries of lance and grail, but in his case, both symbols are unified in a symbol of death and destruction, the harpoon. Both lance and grail symbols in Ahab's quest are profanely used in the blasphemous dedication of the crew and in the blessing of the harpoon. In the ritual initiation of his quest, Ahab has the harpooneers dislodge the sockets of their harpoons from the shafts and drink pledges to the quest from them, as if from grails. Later, Ahab baptizes his specially forged harpoon in the blood of these harpooneers to make a bleeding lance of it, but he blesses his lance "non. . . in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli." The harpooneers themselves, all primitive savages, represent archetypal nature spirits, or golux figures, conventional figures in romance; yet, except for Queequeg, they are less involved with the death and rebirth cycle of the lower world than they are with the sacrificial ritual Ahab makes of his quest.

The Fisher King figure symbolizes the romantic wasteland. Like Ahab, he is a victim of the dragon. In terms of archetypal symbolism, the Fisher King is fishing for the dragon, but he is not succeeding in hooking him. The dragon symbolizes, Frye says, "the whole fallen world of sin and death and tyranny into which Adam fell," the world in which the Fisher King figure, like Adam, is impotent, and from which he must be saved by a Christ figure, or the pure quester, one like Galahad. Ahab is a fisherman who is also a "Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans," but one also who is unable to hook the dragon, Moby Dick, the incarnation of "all evil" to him and the object of "all the general rage and hate" Ahab has inherited from "his whole race from Adam down." Ahab usurps Ishmael's role as the young quester whose duty is to save or free him from the dragon. Instead of guarding the mysteries and preserving them to be passed on to the pure young initiate, Ahab himself challenges the mysteries of the universe. This defiant aspect of his character is a defiance of romantic convention. It makes him a Prometheus. As his outright challenge to the heavens in "The Candles" and his unceasing argument with the gods throughout Moby-Dick make dramatically clear, Ahab defies the mysteries of the universe, and he defies the gods he holds responsible for unjustly creating them.

The mythical Prometheus is a titan, one of a race of giants who preceded men on the earth in Greek mythology. The titans, confined to the earth, represented a lower order of gods than the gods on Mount Olympus. Thus their character exhibits the demigod status of the tragic hero, just as Christ's does. As an incarnation of God in human form, Christ is more than a man, but, except in church doctrine, he is not a full divinity. The demigod aspect of Ahab's character shows up in Peleg's description of him, for example, as an "ungodly, god-like man." Prometheus steals fire from the upper world gods on Olympus and gives it to man to save him from darkness. He defies Zeus, the father or ruler of the gods, by doing so. For this transgression, Zeus has him chained to a rock by the god of fire, Hephaestus. Zeus further punishes Prometheus by sending an eagle to devour his liver each day after it grows back each night. Prometheus is an archetypal tragic figure who represents the defiant, flawed, and yet self-sacrificing tragic victim. In Moby-Dick, a Hephaestus figure, Perth, can be said to chain Ahab to Moby Dick by helping to forge the harpoon that Ahab darts into the whale. Other connections between Perth and Hephaestus include the facts that both are blacksmiths and both lame. Through his defiant "intense thinking," Ahab creates a "vulture" that preys upon his own heart much as the eagle preys on Prometheus's liver. Prometheus steals fire; Ahab has worshipped it.

Ahab looks like a man "cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness." The stake is a tree image cut off from life and scorched with fire by having been used in a ritual of human sacrifice, one which Ahab has miraculously survived. A scar marks Ahab's face. This mark of Cain appears as a "perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off in the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded." In the Bible, the mark of Cain itself is associated with the wasteland. Part of God's curse on Cain for killing his mythical double, Able, is that when he "tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield" him "her strength." In "The Symphony," Ahab, like a rotten fruit tree, betrays his tragic thoughts to Starbuck as if casting "his last, cindered apple to the soil." The fruit of Ahab's "intense thinking" is, ironically, rotten. His thoughts reveal to him the cosmic injustices of the human condition that so torment him. Ahab is associated with wasteland vegetation imagery, but in each of these examples, he is a powerful enough character to fight proudly against being overcome by the wasteland. His suffering and his strength are Promethean. He overcomes being nearly burned alive, maimed, stricken and killed by lightning, and blighted with madness. The dragon knocks Ahab down, as he does the Fisher King; but defiantly, like Prometheus with his liver eaten out, Ahab gets back up again.

According to Nietzsche's reading of the myth of Prometheus in The Birth of Tragedy, Prometheus, like all other tragic heroes, is but a mask of the original god of Greek tragedy, Dionysus, the god of wine, who celebrates man's self-destructive impulses in frenzied, orgiastic rituals of dance and drunkenness. The ecstatic celebration of Dionysus unleashes the primal forces of man and the eternal human spirit's will to power over nature. Tragedy unites this Dionysian rite with art, dramatic form, to celebrate the Apollonian dream vision of natural beauty and order. Frye uses Nietzsche's antithesis between the Dionysian or savage and the Apollonian or artistic impulses as part of his own definition of tragedy. Apollo is the god of light, and of the intellectual light of wisdom and foresight. He is also the god of music and of the perception of the sublime through music. In tragedy, Frye says, "one finds a 'Dionysiac' aggressive will, intoxicated by dreams of its own omnipotence, impinging upon an 'Apollonian' sense of external and immovable order." The tragic hero's self-destructive will brings him up against the mystery of natural law and balance. He sets off the tragic process by violating natural law, and upsetting the balance. But by doing so, he also makes visible through his own tragedy all the beauty, mystery, and terror of human existence.

According to Frazer, the myth of Dionysus takes a death and rebirth pattern in which Dionysus is torn to pieces by jealous titans but in some way resurrected by being pieced back together by his mother, Demeter, or raised from the dead by his father, Zeus. Dionysus, as the god of wine and the vine, was a god of vegetation and of "trees in general." That Dionysus is a tree god may explain why Frye uses the tree as a metaphor for the tragic hero. For Frye the tragic hero is like a "great tree more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass." In striking contrast to the wasteland images with which he associates Ahab elsewhere, Melville at one point uses the same tree metaphor to describe Ahab. After Ahab's dramatic challenge of the gods in "The Candles," where he is at the height of his tragic defiance of the heavens, Ahab is like a "lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much more a mark for thunderbolts." The tree imagery with which Ahab is associated has archetypal roots in the romantic wasteland and in the tragic sacrificial destruction of the great tree god of vegetation, Dionysus, in his suffering, stricken, but defiant, Promethean form.

Melville connects the imagery of "stricken, blasted" Ahab with Ahab's monomaniacal defiance of the heavens. Ahab hints in "The Candles" that the scar on his brow has come from the ritual worship of fire. In "the sacramental act," he was "so burned" by the "clear spirit of clear fire" he worshipped that he has ever since borne the scar. The wasteland imagery with which Ahab's ship and his quest are associated consistently establishes a relation between the direction or object of the quest and the wasted, barren condition of the ship. When passing around the Cape of Good Hope, all life seems to be "vacating itself" from before the Pequod's prow. The ship itself looks like a place of "desolation." As the crew pushes on with the quest, at night "the shrieks of the ocean" sound as if in warning. The fatalistic aspect behind the wasteland imagery can be seen in the way the oil-brimming Bachelor "went cheerily before the breeze," while the Pequod "stubbornly fought against it" as Ahab stands upon the deck with a vial of barren, Nantucket sand in his hand. On the second day of the chase, the Pequod bowls along through the ocean, but leaves a wake behind it, like a "cannon-ball, missent," which "turns up the level field." The voyage itself, it is here suggested, makes a wasteland of the sea. As the crew's hopes revive on the second day of the chase, the fertility of the ship revives. The "rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs . . . all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate," as if momentarily overcoming the wasteland imagery of the ship. In keeping with the suggestion that a fatal process is laying waste the Pequod, Melville also makes effective use of the imagery of disease. The Pequod meets the Jeroboam, on board of which there is a raging epidemic; then the crew proceeds to kill a diseased old whale. The Pequod meets the Rosebud, which has two rotting whales, barren of oil, moored to her side. Mental disease, madness, afflicts Ahab, Pip, and the Carpenter. Queequeg simply gets sick.

In the romance, the Fisher King is important because, as a victim, he contributes to the development of the imagery of the wasteland and because he plays a part in the mystical, redemptive aspect of the young quester's successful quest. In Moby-Dick this Fisher King figure becomes the main character of the narrative. He is given a Promethean, defiant aspect; yet like Job, another archetypal tragic victim, Ahab tries to make himself into a full Promethean figure whose quest is self-sacrificial and undertaken for the benefit of all mankind, but here he fails. Although Ahab conceives of his struggle in universal terms, he is still chasing "a Job's whale round the world." His quest remains a personal solution to a Job's predicament: he is absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his quest, but he is challenged by the doubts of others. Like Job he places greater emphasis on presenting a convincing case for his righteousness—particularly in the way he stresses the injustice of the human condition—than on stressing the self-sacrificial part of the quest, as Christ and Prometheus do.

In his defiance of the gods, Ahab is a Prometheus; in the righteousness he stands upon in defense of his defiance, he is a Job; and as a Fisher King who endures and overcomes his suffering, Ahab exhibits the inner strength of both Prometheus and Job. However, Job is an innocent tragic victim, and although Ahab protests his own innocence and the innocence of all mankind, he is still flawed. In Ahab's view, the gods, not humanity, are responsible for creating evil in the world. The evil in human nature is all part of the absurd, ironic plan worked out by vicious gods—and among these the God of the myth of Job would certainly have a prominent place. But Ahab is not, like Job, "perfect and upright," nor is he a man who "feared God, and eschewed evil." Because Ahab is in a state of hybris, he is unable to see his flaw. Ahab's hybris, or monomania, is the source of the strength which enables him to "possess a thousand fold more potency that ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object." It is also the source of the moral violation, the sultanism, with which he makes an "irresistible dictatorship: of his command by using "external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base." Ahab commits the crime of "usurpation." He assumes the power of the ship's owners, and so transgresses his authority as captain. The mythical parallel for "Ahab's crime, on the archetypal level, is of course Prometheus's theft of fire from the gods. The "innermost core of the tale of Prometheus" is, as Nietzsche says, "the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically striving individual." Ahab's crime is an expression of his "titanically striving" character, his monomania.

The object of the quest to a lower world often takes the form of a treasure hoard guarded by the dragon. When "it is wisdom that is sought in the lower world," Frye says, "it is almost always wisdom connected with the anxiety of death in some form or other, along with the desire to know what lies beyond." The doubloon's symbolism reveals self-knowledge to Ahab which is for him more terrible than death, just as the treasure imagery of the "misermerman" wisdom's "hoarded heaps" of truth reveals to Pip the terrifying knowledge that drives him mad. The doubloon, "like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self." For Ahab the doubloon symbolizes the individual's isolation before the riddle of his inexplicable, mortal existence. Ahab chooses finally to reject the value of his earthly life and to carry on a spiritual rebellion with all the power of his being. "Born in throes 'tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs." Ahab would know the answer to the riddle of his existence, but if he cannot, he will yet strive to know, rebelling with all the resolve and righteousness of tragic pessimism.

The symbolism of the doubloon itself can be read in terms of archetypal romantic symbolism. From this perspective, it becomes a symbol of dramatic irony. The symbol of the self-knowledge that is more terrible than death, Frye says, conventionally appears in the imagery of "some form of scales or balance, the emblem of the law, and a sinister emblem because it quantifies, so to speak, all the elements of life that we feel cannot or ought not to be weighed or measured." The symbolism engraved upon the doubloon shows the sun to be in the zodiacal sign of Libra, which is the sign of the scales or balance. According to Frye, the romantic hero's descent into and return from a night world has an analogy with the cyclical journey of the sun. The sun here is the symbol of romantic idealism. On the doubloon are three mountains, with a tower, a flame, and a crowing cock on each one respectively. In the romance, the point of epiphany, according to Frye, is the point at which the cyclical world of nature comes into alignment with the undisplaced apocalyptic level of the mythological universe, usually at the climactic turning point of the quest's ascent. The mountain top is a conventional point of epiphany of the cyclical world of nature with the upper paradisal world of gods, wisdom, virtue, and salvation. The fact that there are three mountains is significant as the number three is a magical number in romance. It appears repeatedly with important apocalyptic association with the trinity of Christian symbolism, the three-day cycle of Christ's death and resurrection, and the three-part form of the romance itself.

On one of the mountains is a tower—the human analogy to the natural point of epiphany, symbolized by the mountain. On the second, is the flame, which is another point of epiphany with the upper world, having still stronger apocalyptic associations, as with the revelations of the law to Moses by the flame on Mount Sinai. On the third mountain is a crowing cock, which symbolizes the coming judgment of the guilty by the dawn, as in the myth of Peter's betrayal of his friendship with Christ three times before the cock crows on the night Christ is betrayed. A similar use of the crowing cock appears, for example in Hamlet, where it awakes the "god of day" and so warns away "Th'extravagant and erring spirit" or "guilty thing" of the night, as it frightens off the ghost of Hamlet's father. The crowing cock thus heralds the coming judgment by the god of the sun, or of romantic idealism, upon man, the tower, in the form of a fiery revelation, the flame on the mountain top. Although Ahab is isolated, he still has the choice of accepting this isolation as a means to discovering the inner freedom which will enable him to slay the dragon of evil and death within his own mind. Ahab himself has nailed the doubloon to the main-mast, and he himself can take it down. Ahab, however, chooses pessimism and defiance over the balanced and idealistic vision of good and evil Ishmael is to attain as the romantic hero of the story.

Ahab continues his quest, and the prophecy of the doubloon shortly afterward speaks true. The fiery judgment against him comes in the midst of the furious typhoon that follows. As the corposants flare at all three of the ship's mastheads, Starbuck sees the fatal sign from an orthodox Christian perspective. He cries out, "God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued." For Ishmael also, the image of the balance returns, now with fatal overtones. The corposants to him represent the "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin" judgment of God, the words which, in the myth of Daniel, appear as a judgment against King Belshazzar for his idolatry. Belshazzar calls upon Daniel to interpret these words which are mysteriously written on the wall by a supernatural hand. According to Daniel, "This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians." Belshazzar was slain that night. So Ahab must soon be slain also, as he has set off the inscrutable tragic action that will destroy him.

From the end of the cetological center on to the end, the action takes the form of one steady, inevitable movement toward catastrophe. Ahab's flawed willfulness, his monomania, sets off the balancing process in nature known as nemesis, which even from the outset of the voyage places Ahab's quest in the grip of the fatal tragic process. This grip tightens at the end of the cetological center. The process accelerates. According to Frye, nemesis simply "happens, and happens impersonally." There is no direct cause and effect explanation for fate. It must be understood as a process of the narrowing of a course of action toward one inevitable outcome. The hero's tragic flaw is partly responsible for bringing this process upon himself. His hybris compels him to choose a course of action which, once chosen, sets off the entire train of events over which he steadily loses control. His choice is free and yet fated too by the very flawed nature of his character, as if the hero were doomed no matter what course of action he would choose. The tragic hero is a sacrificial victim who is set apart by his society as an object of admiration, even veneration, and an object of jealousy and hatred. The tragic hero himself mirrors this contradictoriness within his noble, but flawed character. Hero and his society grapple together in this ultimately inexplicable tragic process which is the compelling social imitation of the savage ritual of human sacrifice.

While working at the shuttle of a mat-maker on deck one afternoon, Ishmael considers the problem of fate and free will by means of the classical metaphor of the loom. Ishmael pictures himself as the shuttle. He weaves, by his own free will, the threads of his destiny into the fixed threads of the warp, which represent necessity. Chance is the "sword" which Queequeg uses to tighten up the threads after Ishmael has woven them together. Thus "prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events." Ishmael presents the archetypal tragic view of free will and fate, as fate is but chance come under the inscrutable law of the tragic process. Although Ishmael has the freedom to run the thread of his destiny in slightly varying ways into the fixed threads of necessity, his course is virtually fixed. In Paradise Lost, Milton's Adam and Eve are in a similar predicament. As Frye points out, they are "Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall." The tragic hero is immersed in this mystery. Even up to the point of death, the mystery lingers. No matter how inevitable his death becomes, it still comes, in some way, unexpectedly, as when Lear, arriving too late to save Cordelia, dies of a broken heart, or as when Hamlet, ready to take his revenge, is treacherously poisoned. Although everything, ship, whaleboats, and crew, is being torn apart before his eyes at the end, Ahab dies as if by some fatal fluke when he is killed by getting caught in a turn of the whale line.

In the illustrative tale of "The Town-Ho's Story," Ishmael foretells of a "strange fatality" pervading events involving Moby Dick. In this story particularly, Ishmael attempts to describe the universal aspect of "instinctive malice" or evil in human nature which is the human counterpart for the universal evil Ahab finds incarnate in Moby Dick. This flaw in human nature is part of a natural balancing process in human affairs. One man's jealousy and evil opposes another's greatness and goodness, as "it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellowmen finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it." A tragic-romantic struggle flares up between the handsome, noble Steelkilt and the ugly, malicious Radney. Steelkilt becomes the ironic victim of Radney's abuse. He plots revenge, but "by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done." Moby Dick is sighted on the very morning before the night Steelkilt plans to murder Radney. But before Radney can fix his lance in the whale, the boat strikes the whale's side, and Radney is spilled out. Moby Dick seizes him in his jaws, and takes him down. This story illustrates a fatal process which shows "a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men." This visitation is "inverted," in one sense, as it is made by the lower world dragon instead of by an upper world god. The suggestion throughout Moby-Dick is that heaven and hell, upper and lower levels of the mythological universe, are leagued together in the White Whale in a similar manner to the way in which they are leagued together in the Book of Job. But the wedding between heaven and hell in Moby-Dick is not necessarily a pact between God and the devil.

Ahab's sultanism takes the form at times of the malicious flaw Radney's conduct so well evidences. This sultanism or abuse of authority is the immoral aspect of Ahab's monomania. The monomania itself is the state of hybris Ahab is in which makes him too strong and too high to permit him to stand up forever against the continual striving for superiority which characterizes the behavior of all living beings. As long as Ahab's tower is high, others will gather to knock it down. Ahab has not survived forty years in the whaling industry without having learned this lesson well. From the outset of this voyage, he knows that the success of his quest will depend upon his ability to destroy the petty, egotistical towers of opposition which the sanctimonious Starbuck, the foolishly jolly Stubb, or the mediocre Flask might wish to erect. Stubb and Flask are comic characters in conception. They choose quickly to steer clear of Ahab once Ahab has trampled Stubb's little erection into the dust as his first order of business on the voyage. Jolly Stubb is no match for Ahab.

Ahab's sultanism appears most drastically, however, in his abusive treatment of Starbuck. From the start, Starbuck openly opposes Ahab's quest for Moby Dick, but Ahab, having already shown his scorn for Starbuck and the other officers by completely bypassing their confidential judgments with a direct appeal to the crew, handles this opposition as forcefully as he handles Stubb's earlier. Starbuck continues to protest throughout the voyage, but as a chorus character, who, as Frye describes this tragic figure, "is in the position of refusing, or at any rate resisting, the tragic movement toward catastrophe." From the beginning of the voyage onward, Ahab remains socially inaccessible, and throughout all the action of the cetological center, he remains in the background, a dark, violent figure, who appears only for the lowerings or steps forward out of his isolation only for the gams with passing ships or for a soliloquy on the deserted deck. Starbuck confronts Ahab in his cabin on the matter of oil leaking in the ship's hold. Whale oil is no longer Ahab's chief concern, but keeping Starbuck under control is. Starbuck is talking too much. Ahab rips a musket off the cabin wall, and levels it at him. The thing to do with Starbuck is to shame him into obedience; "There is one God that is lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod—On deck!"

The stressful situation Ahab creates on the ship makes the deck seem more and more like the stage Ishmael likens it to through his frequent use of stage directions. Set off on this stage and magnified, the character of the Carpenter and of the blacksmith Perth seem like gigantic titans at the mouth of hell. The action precipitates into the final stages of the descent. Ahab moves into action. In the rush toward the three-day chase, he emerges to seize command with the iron grip of his will. From the more passive, brooding figures of the cetological center, Ahab becomes the animated, aggressive, and actively dominating central character of the narrative. A new leg is in order, and a special harpoon for Moby Dick. Ahab changes his mind about Starbuck's advice to check the hold for leaks. He orders the check to be made. During the check, Queequeg gets sick from having to crawl around in the ship's dark, dank hold. He almost dies. In the same way that Pip's madness cannot be causally related to the intense stress Ahab creates on the Pequod, neither can Ahab be held responsible for directly causing Queequeg to get sick, but the strain can now be seen to be breaking out in the crew from Pip's madness and the confrontation between Ahab and Starbuck to Queequeg's sickness. The outbursts and madness of Ahab, Pip, and the Carpenter are set off against the gloomy background and lit up, "Then come out those fiery effulgences," as Ishmael says, "infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell." The silence of the crew becomes more and more the cracking silence of desperation.

The fatal process clamps down vicelike over the voyage and tightens. After Ahab's confrontation with Starbuck and after the ship's hold is searched for leaks and then resealed, Queequeg gets sick, then better. Ahab christens his harpoon "in nomine diaboli" with harpooneer blood. The Pequod meets the Bachelor and the striking contrast between the two ships clashes the dark figure of Ahab on the Pequod's barren deck against the reveling celebration of the homeward bound ship. The Pequod's boats lower. More whales are killed, but this time Ahab spends an entire night separated from his ship. He hears Fedallah's prophecy of his doom. Tensions build. Now in the sultry Japanese seas, Ahab's anger ignites in him a red, furious rage. He smashes the ship's quadrant. A typhoon follows. Corposants flare at the mast-heads. Ahab screams his defiance at the bully gods. The entire awestruck, speechless crew gazes on aghast. But the waves batter a hole in Ahab's whaleboat; lightning strikes the unsheathed harpoon in its bow. That night Starbuck contemplates murdering Ahab, but he backs down. The next day, Ahab discovers that the storm has reversed the polarity on the ship's compasses. The ship's course has been errantly changed. But Ahab manages to change the needles back and re-set his course. The Pequod enters the equatorial hunting grounds, the peculiar grounds of Moby Dick. Strange wailings are heard that night. Ahab explains them to be the cries of seals to their cubs, but the superstitious among the crew believe them to be the warnings of newly drowned sailors. The dawn of that very day, the first man to go aloft to his watch falls to his death. The life buoy is thrown in after him. It sinks.

One incident piles upon another with one bad sign after the next. All of the action builds toward catastrophe. The balancing process in nature which Ahab's quest upsets is the product of nature's unending duality. Nature is both calm and storm, appearance and "reality," object and symbol, concrete and abstract, creative and destructive, good and evil, life and death. The color of whiteness itself symbolizes this duality, as it unifies both good and evil associations. The undulating, untroubled waves on the surface but conceal the universal cannibalism of the sea that rages beneath it. Outwardly beautiful, nature is inwardly demonic. The human mind's capacity to perceive the meaning of this cosmic duality operates within the balance between sanity and madness. The universal truths or laws of nature are not, in their true metaphysical significance, sanely perceivable by the human mind. Thus as Pip gains insight into the hidden laws of nature by nearly drowning in the "heartless immensity" of the sea, he gains wisdom, but he goes mad. Ahab's similar experience with Moby Dick tips the balance in his mind also and motivates his mad quest for revenge. That Melville intends the quest for Moby Dick to be interpreted as the breaking of a mythical taboo, similar to Job's attempt to gain too much wisdom, can be seen in the association Ishmael makes between the battering ram power of the whale and the myth of the Egyptian goddess of Sais. Ishmael asks, "What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Sais?" The youth who lifts the veil, though warned against doing so, lives ever afterward in gloom, and the knowledge that he gains leads him to an early grave. In Egyptian mythology, the goddess of Sais, Neith, "was the great weaver who wove the world with her shuttle as a woman weaves cloth." According to Plutarch, an inscription over her temple at Sais read, "I am all that has been, that is, and that will be. No mortal has yet been able to lift the veil which covers me." The cosmic meaning of the destruction of Ahab, his ship, and his crew lies similarly behind the veil of mythical riddles which covers the hidden spiritual "reality" of existence.

According to Frye, the upsetting of the balance leads to an epiphany of law in which the hero realizes that what is must be. He attains a simultaneous vision of the great potential destiny which might have been his, but which he has forsaken, and the one he must now face as he recognizes the "determined shape of the life he has created for himself." This epiphany of law comes for Ahab in "The Symphony," which is the last chapter before the beginning of the final narrative movement. Here in the calm of a beautiful, balmy day on the rolling, undulating, equatorial, Eastern seas, Ahab reflects on his past with full consciousness of the coming struggle with the White Whale. Ahab has "forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horror of the deep!" He tries to explain to himself the absurdity of this choice: "Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?" Another life might have been his, but he has chosen to rebel against life and against the absurdity of life.

Ahab's attempt to sum up and make sense of his entire life here is ominous of the coming catastrophe. He considers the problem of fate. "Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?" The mystery of his existence baffles and enrages him. Ahab rejects conventional faith in one god or another as the solution to the riddling ironies of life. Just as Job continues to protest his righteousness even as he is punished, as the guilty are punished, with misfortune, so Ahab persists in demanding the answers to his questions. What is the source of the "Invisible power" of his life, his thinking brain, his beating heart, his living being? What does the existence of evil, the instinctive destructiveness of both human and beast, mean? How can humanity be held responsible for evil when a supernatural creator is responsible for creating his potential to do evil or to be evil? "Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?"

In an echo of Ishmael's conclusion that chance or fate has the "last featuring blow at events," fate is for Ahab like the handspike or crank on a windless, a barrel-shaped shaft around which the anchor lines are wound. This image of fate places responsibility for man's action in the hands of the supernatural force which turns the handspike. Humanity but turns round and round as the windlass turns to help God do his work. In this way, Ahab attempts to justify and make sense of his rebellion in his own mind as predetermined and inevitable. Ahab rejects the world. He rejects companionship. He rejects the romantic vision of a potentially harmonious life for humanity in this world. What then remains? For Ahab what remains is revenge upon the White Whale, and Ahab demands revenge. Just as God, though cruel and reproving to Job, redeems Job for speaking the truth, so the "step-mother world" throws her "affectionate arms" around Ahab. A tear rolls down his cheek into the sea in this epiphany of law which is also Ahab's moment of redemption.

"The Symphony" is the calm before the storm. In the final three chapters, Ishmael presents the catastrophe. As for the laws of nature, they are unknowable in their true metaphysical significance. The mimickery of consciousness, reason and rationalism, science and philosophy, mythology and religion but supply the many colored lenses through which the blank veil over the inscrutable universe may be viewed, but no mortal eye may see beyond the veil, nor human arm lift it. The crew rallies to take up Ahab's defiant challenge to strike through the mocking mask. Ahab is mad, but Ishmael reveals the sane "vital truth" of his madness. In his presentation of the three-day chase, Ishmael leaves no doubt about the supernaturalism of the White Whale, as after all the conjecture and speculation, the superstitious fears and reasoned doubts, the waiting, the courage, the anxiety, and the dreams, Moby Dick uprises in all his cosmic mystery as an invulnerable and omnipotent, enraged and wrathful agent of catastrophe.

For the stunning finale of his tale, Ishmael presents a pure, dynamic narration of the death struggle with the White Whale. The baffling disproportions with which he presents the struggle transform the action into mythical "unreality." In the hypnotic, enchanting frenzy of his wrath, Moby Dick hallucinatorily changes in appearance from the seeming "weasel" swimming straight up from under Ahab's boat to the astonishing, breaching monster that tosses himself "salmon-like to Heaven." All objects take on a mythical aura of significant existence as Ishmael presents the action with the intricate detail that represents the mind's strain in moments of the most intense peril to apprehend an inconceivable experience. While Ahab's boat quivers in the whale's mouth, with "one of the teeth caught in a row lock," the "bluish pearl-white of the jaw" is "within six inches of Ahab's head." The crew becomes as tiny objects. Moby Dick dashes the boats together as if they were "two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach." He makes a horrifying mockery of his hunters as, disappearing in a "boiling maelstrom," he leaves broken boats spinning around in his wake "like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch." He launches Ahab's boat into the air and sends it booming up as if "drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires." Like an apocalyptic dragon of judgment day doom, Moby Dick moves through the water, a moving mountain. He looks like "some swift tide rip, at the mouth of a deep rapid stream." He leaves a wake like a "moving valley." He breaches to glitter and glare "like a glacier" and to rain down a "sparkling" spray that fades and fades into the "dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale." Moby Dick is a mystical, fabulous blur of "heaps of fountains," "shower of flakes," "circling surface creamed like new milk," and "marble trunk." In the mythical rift between the opposites of the beauty and terror of the whale exists the apocalyptic threshold between this world and the next.

The end of Ahab and his crew is a catastrophe because it ends a tragic process. Ahab falls inwardly into the abyss of his madness as he perseveres outwardly in the quest. The catastrophe becomes inevitable. With sharks swarming round his whaleboat on the third and final day of the chase, Ahab goes out to encounter the whale for the last time. His fate fulfills Fedallah's prophecy to the word. He sees his ship battered before his eyes by the whale: "Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled." In this descriptive avowal of the whale's intelligent malignity, Ahab sees the second coffin, this one made of American wood, foretold by Fedallah. The first coffin, "not made by mortal hands," is the whale himself as Ahab fearfully discovers when he sees Fedallah's ghastly corpse caught up in the turns upon turns of whale lines that pin him to the whale's side. Ahab hurls his harpoon into the whale. "Hemp only" can kill Ahab, Fedallah has said, and the hempen whale line does kill Ahab. The entire crew goes down in the whirling vortex the sinking ship creates, and the final image Ishmael presents is one in which "man's insanity" is indeed "heaven's sense." To the very end, Tashtego insanely attempts to nail a flag to the main mast, while a sea-hawk swoops about his head. He pinions the bird to the mast with his hammer, and the bird, "a living part of heaven," goes down with the ship. Nature rights the balance Ahab has upset, and then "all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

Ahab's quest has the righteousness of Job's struggle against suffering. It has also behind it the Prometheanism which Nietzsche describes as the "titanic impulse to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and to carry them on broad shoulders higher and higher, farther and farther," as Ahab turns a shabby whaling voyage into an epic of American heroism. "But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter," as Ishmael says, and if Ahab's titanic striving is flawed, if his iron will weighs heavily and brutally over his crew and leads them all to their doom, yet on the three days when Moby Dick is sighted and chased Ahab's cry goes out and the entire crew scatters to his side, the boats are manned and speechlessly dropped to the sea. Though the first day nearly ends in disaster, yet not one protesting voice sounds among the crew. On the second day Moby Dick is sighted and the crew is not thirty, but one man. Ahab sees the whale again, and this time his cry is answered by the "triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs." Again the boats are instantly lowered. All three are stove; Fedallah, lost. The men work to ready the boats for the next day's chase. On the third day, Ahab "descried the spout again, and instantly from the mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it." Ahab heaps his men with a trial of the will. He leads them on all mutilated against the whale, and their souls rise up with his.

Within the containing framework of Ishmael's romantic experience in the sea world, Ahab plays a dominant part which develops beyond the conventions of the double or doppelganger theme. According to the conventions of this theme, as the hero enters the lower world, he meets his double there. However, as the hero begins to recover his original identity, the double develops into a sinister figure from whom the hero has to separate himself, as, for example, can be seen in the case of the Dimmesdale-Chillingsworth relationship in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. The death of the double figure can solve the problem of separation, as it does in a highly abstract way in Poe's "William Wilson." The double's death is a sacrificial substitution for the hero's. From the beginning to the end of Moby-Dick, a radical shift in narrative focus occurs. The beginning presents a series of romantic adventures focused around a young, disillusioned quester, Ishmael. By the end of Moby-Dick, the story has shifted its focus to present an aged, maimed hero's tragic quest, Ahab's. The transition occurs in the middle part of Moby-Dick which has been called here the "cetological center." Melville succeeds in bringing this transition about by using the double theme to develop a structural split in his narrative. This split enables him to work with Ishmael and Ahab as doubles, and yet keep them separated. He is then able gradually to remove Ishmael from the narrative as he brings Ahab's part into dominance.

The archetypal basis of Ahab's character as a double figure is the tragic germ of his identity. As the hero's double, his doom is a sacrificial death, a substitute for the hero's. Melville considerably complicates Ahab's identity in order to develop his character out of the simple romantic double figure role. He associates Ahab with the romantic figure of the Fisher King, a wounded, aged guardian of the mystical lance and grail in the medieval grail romances. However, Ahab proceeds to break with this figure's conventional pattern of development. He usurps the role of quester from Ishmael and breaks a romantic convention by doing so. He initiates the quest for Moby Dick, and he dominates this quest. As double, Ahab is to be a sacrificial victim for Ishmael, and, because tragedy develops as an imitation of the ritual of sacrifice, Melville is able to move from the archetypal form of romance to that of tragedy through the shift in focus from Ishmael to Ahab. As a Promethean Fisher King, Ahab overcomes his incapacitating, wounded condition to lead a quest for revenge in spite of the romantic conventions that would constrain him.

Ahab intuits evil in Moby Dick. The whale becomes for Ahab an object of revenge for the injustices he perceives in his own stricken condition and in the human condition itself. Ahab's monomaniacal desire to hunt the whale down puts him in the ironic position of Job. Ahab suffers the predicament of having to justify and persevere in a quest which is madness to the ordinary world. However, Ishmael, like a god, reveals Ahab's madness to be the "sane madness of vital truth" which Melville, in his review of "Hawthorne and His Mosses," claimed to find in the things Shakespeare "says or insinuates" through his great tragic heroes, "the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them." As God at last supports Job's conviction in his own righteousness by scolding Job's accusers for not have spoken "the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath," Ishmael at last supports Ahab's conviction in the White Whale's supernatural, intelligent malignity by means of the descriptive method he uses to portray the final struggle as an apocalyptic catastrophe.

Behind the defiant and righteous aspects of Ahab's character, however, is the hybris of monomania, a mad willful striving against all human limitations that leads Ahab to the violation of moral law, or hamartia, which Ishmael calls his sultanism, Ahab's tragic flaw. This violation is the manipulative and deceptive abuse of his authority as captain. Ahab upsets the balance of natural law by breaking the law of trust which ties one man to another, and he sets off the tragic process of nemesis which can be seen at work in the madness of his own mind and in the corresponding fatal events of the external world. The process is tragic because it effects the downfall of a character who is a hero in the archetypal tragic sense. Ahab is flawed, but he is also an extraordinarily heroic man with a highly perceptive mind and with the force and depth of character that make him "one in a whole nation's census—a might pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies." His fall, then, ends in a catastrophe. Ahab's titanic spirit passes out of the world of nature to unite with the mystery against which he has struggled.

Melville creates the sensational effect of a tragic catastrophe by directing all the various themes of the work into one steady progression toward the death struggle. However, the end is still a romantic catastrophe. The tragic aspect has been stressed here, but this aspect exists within the larger romantic dragon quest structure of the work as a whole. The basic elements of the story remain fundamentally romantic in conception. The highly abstract nature of Ahab's quest and the stark, idealistic contrast Melville sets up between dark Ahab and the White Whale represent conventions of romance. Ahab's action takes the form of a tragic process, but it does so more within the context of the romantic descent to a lower world than within the more conventional tragic context of the isolation of the tragic hero from society.

## Chapter 5: Ishmael's Ascent

All three stages of ascent—recognition, separation from the demonic, and restoration of memory—show up in Ishmael's presentation in the Epilogue of his ascent from the Pequod's catastrophe. A far more figurative and displaced form of ascent, however, occurs earlier within a psychological context. Recognition for Ishmael occurs in "A Squeeze of the Hand." Here he attains an experience and a vision of a transcendent love that transforms his inner world into the idyllic level of the mythological universe. This experience, however, remains an individual one unreconciled to the conditions of existence in the ordinary world. In "The Try-Works," Ishmael separates his identity from Ahab and his quest, and he calls to mind the wisdom of the ages to support the separation. The restoration of memory continues with the succession of optimistic, comprehensive statements Ishmael makes on the cyclical pattern of life and death in successive chapters—"Stowing Down and Clearing Up," "The Blacksmith," and "The Gilder"—before he disappears altogether from the action. Ishmael's disappearance from the action symbolizes his completion of the inner, psychological ascent, and so poetically justifies his survival in the Epilogue.

In the Epilogue, Melville presents Ishmael's survival with the imagery of the mythical birth of the hero. This imagery forms the recognition stage of his ascent. Central to it is the image of the flood which engulfs the sinking ship, the flood being, in Frye's words, "the regular symbol of the beginning and end of a cycle." The image of the coffin life-buoy is a modulation of the "ark or chest" upon which the infant hero is placed and then set adrift, as in the myths of Moses or Perseus. The vortex itself is an image of destruction in one sense and of creative unity between sea and sky in another. It separates Ishmael from all the rest of the Pequod's doomed crew and provides the means of his salvation. But tragic associations with Ishmael's identity in the ordinary world return as his memory is fully restored. He is only "another orphan" without a home and without a place in society. The land world is the displacement for the ordinary level of the mythological universe in Moby-Dick, and though Ishmael is a self-elected exile from it, he must return to it until he is ready to escape once again.

The archetype of the romantic hero is the messianic quester who, like Christ, descends into a lower world to deliver the captives and to lead them to salvation in an idyllic world. In Moby-Dick the functions of the messianic quester are split between the archetypal doubles, Ahab and Ishmael. Only when taken together do these two characters perform Christ's role. Ishmael descends into the sea world. There the sacrificial double side of his character, Ahab, takes control of the action. Ahab then imitates Christ's sacrifice with a quest that begins on Christmas day, Christ's birthday, and ends with a three-day chase, an imitation of Christ's death and resurrection in three days. Ahab dies and Ishmael is reborn symbolically the way Christ is reborn as a God out of the death of his earthly double self. As a structural unit in and of itself, however, Ishmael's quest is patterned after Jonah's. Jonah himself is a prototype of Christ, and just as Ahab's archetypal character is a mixture of figures and characteristics, so is Ishmael's. The Messianic, visionary aspect of Ishmael's character comes from his alignment with the myth of Daniel; the mocking outcast part of his character, from the myth of Ishmael. The figure of Jonah thus provides the basic form of Ishmael's individual character, while central characteristics from Daniel and Ishmael deepen it.

Melville demonstrates the importance of the Jonah myth for him by making it the subject of two full chapters, "The Sermon" and "Jonah Historically Regarded." As has been pointed out earlier, Mapple's sermon is a modulation of what Frye calls a mirror symbol. Mirror symbols appear at the threshold of the lower world to indicate the kind of world the hero is about to enter. This sermon thus performs the same function as the Spouter-Inn oil-painting, namely, of introducing Ishmael to the charms and spells of the dreamlike romance world. Ishmael enters into an experience which imitates the archetypal pattern of the Jonah myth Mapple discusses. He demonstrates later, too, in "Jonah Historically Regarded" particularly, that the significance of the Jonah myth for him, as for Melville, is not its historical accuracy but its mythical authority as an ancient and conventionalized way of viewing, interpreting, and learning from experience.

In the biblical myth, Jonah is a prophet who seeks to escape his duty. God tells Jonah, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me." To escape God's will, Jonah flees to the sea world and takes to the ship. But God starts a storm to stop him. To save themselves from God's wrath, the crew decides to throw Jonah overboard, and God sends a "great fish," or dragon, to swallow him. For three days and three nights Jonah suffers in the belly of the dragon, this three-day rhythm being analogous to Christ's three-day entombment, and of course also to the Pequod's three-day chase. While in the belly of the dragon, Jonah finds the strength within himself to praise God, to proclaim his faith in God, and even to thank God. "But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving"; he tells God, "I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord." God delivers Jonah from the dragon because he repents. Jonah then goes to Nineveh to cry out against the city and to fulfill his duty as God's prophet. Much in the same way that Jonah flees from Nineveh, Ishmael skulks from New York. Ishmael seeks to escape a frustrated life on land and to avoid the responsibility of speaking out against the land world. He attempts to escape to the sea world, but he is swallowed by the dragon of Ahab's tragedy.

The part Ishmael's mockery plays in forming a parody quest structure within Moby-Dick has already been discussed. The satire, however, itself plays an important part, too, in developing the archetypal pattern of Ishmael's inner ascent out of the dragon-belly of circumstance or fate. Ishmael extricates himself from a tragic process, and he is the only character who succeeds in doing so. As has been pointed out, one pole of satire is an idealistic standard; the other pole is the mockery of other standards that fail to measure up to this idealistic standard. Ishmael's ideals are the central romantic ones, which are, as Frye describes them, liberty, equality, and fraternity, and as Ishmael becomes increasingly alienated from his tragic surroundings, he introverts and begins a psychological ascent out of them to a higher, idealized world within his soul or self where he can envision a life in harmony with these ideals.

The discovery or displaced recognition of this inner world takes place in "A Squeeze of the Hand." The mystical conversion experience Ishmael passes through is analogous to Jonah's repentance in the belly of the dragon, but the visionary and messianic characteristics of Ishmael's experience are analogous to characteristics of the mythical Daniel, the biblical figure gifted with "understanding in all visions and dreams." Ishmael reads the corposants on the mastheads as if reading the writing on King Belshazzar's wall, writing which Daniel interprets in the myth. Following his trial in the belly of Ahab's tragedy, Ishmael finds himself surrounded by sharks and sea-hawks, but just as the lions do not harm Daniel, neither do these creatures harm Ishmael. Daniel is thrown into the lion's den for worshipping his God against the decree that forbids such worship. The punishment for his faith in God is to be thrown into the lion's den, but God rewards Daniel for his faith by keeping the lions from harming him. Whereas Jonah exemplifies repentance, Daniel exemplifies right conduct and obedience to the law or to what Emerson calls "Beautiful Necessity" in his essay, "Fate." In "A Squeeze of the Hand," Ishmael's introversion leads him to faith in himself. This conversion experience, like Jonah's, forms the first stage of his ascent. It springs from Ishmael's obedience to the laws of circumstance around him. Ishmael does not rebel. He, like Daniel, exemplifies obedience and right conduct under the circumstances. He does his duty and works to free his mind, his inner world, from them.

Daniel is a visionary, and in the final chapters of the Book of Daniel, he witnesses a series of apocalyptic visions, among which the "Son of man," or Messiah, appears. This Messiah is to be the ruler of an "everlasting" kingdom, or symbol of an idyllic world. Besides seeing the angel who shuts the mouths of the lions to save him, Daniel has no visions in the lion's den, but in later chapters, he does have this vision of the Messiah and of the "everlasting" kingdom, and he has other visions of God's final judgment, and of "the time of the end." Ishmael has "visions of the night" as Daniel does, and he witnesses the Pequod's apocalyptic catastrophe. As Ishmael's recognition in "A Squeeze of the Hand" is the first stage of his inner ascent and return to his true identity, all three central characteristics of his identity as Jonah, Daniel, and Ishmael appear together in this chapter in association with idyllic, Garden of Eden or pastoral imagery conventionally associated with the true identity of the romantic hero.

In "A Squeeze of the Hand," Ishmael realizes that the idyllic world is within him and that his true identity is in this idyllic world. While squeezing the unctuous spermaceti on deck under a "blue tranquil sky," he suddenly experiences a transcendent love within himself so strong it overcomes all his conflicts with the world. The spermaceti exudes an "aroma" as of "spring violets," and Ishmael feels as if he is in a "musky meadow." While affectionately squeezing his co-laborers' "hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally," Ishmael thinks, "Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness." The sexual imagery of squeezing the "milk and sperm of kindness" with others "universally" symbolizes a love for humanity that, being both male and female or a union of opposites, transcends all mortal limitations. Ishmael feels "divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever."

Ishmael associates his vision of the attainable idyllic world with heavenly or apocalyptic revelation. Much as Daniel might, he sees "visions of the night" in which appear "long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti." Only by shifting "his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country" can Ishmael hope to attain a way of life in harmony with the inner world he discovers. This country or pastoral life is cut off from society and reduced to the love between husband and wife. Ishmael's idyllic vision is of the kind Frye describes as characteristic of tragic or "penseroso phase" romance. Ishmael envisions the possibility of attaining a blissful, virtually solitary hermitage in the country, but this vision represents an incomplete form of the full romantic one. It represents a tragically frustrated vision of an idyllic world closely resembling the country setting in which Melville wrote most of Moby-Dick.

The recognition in "A Squeeze of the Hand" prepares Ishmael for the second stage of his ascent, the separation from the demonic in "The Try-Works." In keeping with the romantic convention of the separation, which isolates the elements destined to ascend from the lower world from those that are not, Ishmael identifies Ahab and his quest with the demonic. When he describes the smell thrown up by the whale's burning blubber, for example, he uses a classical image of separation: "It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit." In art this archetypal separation is conventionally depicted as the falling of the damned into hell on the left as against the rising of the saved to heaven on the right, the ship specifically being associated with the "left wing" or with the damned and demonic. The Pequod here is a "red hell" which, "freighted with savages," is the "material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul." The context of the separation is inner; it takes place within Ishmael's mind. At the beginning of Moby-Dick, the dominant imagery is the imagery of Ishmael's break in consciousness and loss of identity, but now the ascendant imagery becomes the imagery of his awakening from the spells Ahab's quest has held him under or of the restoration of his memory.

In "A Squeeze of the Hand," Ishmael for the time forgets about the "horrible oath" he has taken to hunt the White Whale, and feeling a "strange sort of insanity" come over him, he joyously discovers the true identity which the tragic world of alienation all around him would have drowned with its own tears of madness and despair; and yet no sooner has the sudden euphoria of this inner discovery passed away than he must once again turn to face the brutal "reality" of Ahab's tragedy; and where in "A Squeeze of the Hand" he had seen "fellow beings," in "The Try-Works" he sees "fiend shapes"; and where he had felt love, he now feels the most intense abhorrence; and as if now he were to realize that his earlier experience had been no more true than the cracked philosophy of some foolish philanthrope who had done a work of kindness for unholy souls to have better been justly dragged to hell; or as if now he were to feel as Steeelkilt had when with an "iron ball, closely netted" and ready to hand, he had already in his own mind ravished revenge upon his tormentor and there had left him "already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in"; or as if like some condemned man who had pent up such fury and hatred within him that though he had been slipped the great iron key to his cell by some heavenly Phantom of fate, he were now to choose not to quit the place of his imprisonment until with trembling hands of rage he had the chance to use that key as the bludgeon with which he would destroy his imprisoner; so under the fiendish, midnight glare of the try-works must Ishmael have realized, have felt, or have chosen to think as he then confusedly looked upon the crew before him; or so much the "kindred visions" of which he speaks or similar ones have rioted through Ishmael's mind; for as if having at last found within himself the strength to pull down the piked and massy gate of tragedy within his own soul, he had been so flooded with the light that had then streamed from the passage upward to freedom beyond that rage that he had been temporarily blinded and made so much the more aware of all his suffering as he ascended that the dark dungeon in which he had so long been held captive had become so much the more terrible to him and the fires of evil smoldering within the heart of that darkness so much the more perverse.

But whatever Ishmael's "kindred visions in" his "soul" to the demonic scene before him may have been, violent and troubling they must have been for certain, for before long they had so vexed and routed all his saner thoughts from consciousness that though entrusted with all the lives of the crew by the tiller at his hand, he had fallen asleep at the helm. In "The Try-Works," Ishmael reaches the limits of his descent, and to go deeper he cannot. He experiences at this point the reverse form of the break in consciousness which occurs at the beginning of the quest. The opposite of the break in consciousness is the restoration of the hero's "broken current of memory," the theme of the third and final stage of his ascent from the lower world back to this one. And of course, in the full romantic cycle the hero would continue his ascent up to the idyllic world of his original identity as Dante does in the Divine Comedy, but as Moby-Dick is a "penseroso phase" romance or an incomplete and therefore tragic form of the full cycle, this displaced restoration of memory is the final stage of Ishmael's psychological ascent.

In "The Try-Works" Ishmael awakens from a "stark, bewildered feeling, as of death," to find himself facing the darkness in the ship's stern, symbolic of the break in his memory. But now the wisdom of the ages is restored to him and so also the balance of his understanding. That it is dark still Ishmael well knows and that he has suffered in darkness he knows also, but the darkness and the suffering will alike pass away as the night before the day or even as life before death. The sun lights both the good and evil sides of this earth, and so when the sun rises Ishmael will be able to see a different world in the sun's light than the demonic one that now so frightens him; but since he can see that the evil side of human existence has by far the greater weight in the balance of this world just as the cannibalistic sea, "which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth," together with all the "millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon" outweigh whatever peaceful, happy places on the land there yet may be, he can see also that "that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped." And yet since this mortal world does still maintain a balance in its duality as night balances with day or as the sea with the land, so Ishmael also will maintain a like balance in his own mind; for though he will be strong enough to see evil, to know it, and to face it unflinchingly wherever he might find it, whether in others or in himself, he will yet be strong enough not to let the darkness of this vision, this knowledge, and this struggle obscure what genuine light of happiness, of peace, and of joy yet streams within his soul: "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." An "eagle" within Ishmael's soul soars to freedom from the "blackest gorges" to the transcendent "sunny spaces" high above. From the higher perspective Ishmael attains, he is able to see the wisdom in Ahab's madness, but he is also able to see the imbalance in it; and as he separates his identity from Ahab and Ahab's quest, he balances his vision of Ahab's vane and ephemeral darkness with a greater vision of darkness and light.

The restoration of memory continues in the displaced form of the interpretive comments Ishmael makes in the next few chapters. The theme uniting these comments is the theme of the cyclical nature of life and death, a displacement of the restoration of memory because it places even greater perspective on the whole of Ishmael's experience and also because it calls up associations with the beginning of his quest and with his reflections on the immortality of his soul in the Whaleman's Chapel, for example. As his inner ascent comes to completion, he turns once again to the theme of life and death, first with a lighthearted affirmation of metempsychosis in "Stowing Down and Clearing Up," then with tragic reflections on Perth in "The Blacksmith."

The sea world offers an escape for the "broken-hearted" like Perth or like Ishmael himself and like other social outcasts, renegades, and castaways who make up the whaleman's world into a life "more oblivious than death." Ishmael himself takes to sea as a "substitute for pistol and ball," and he can see now by studying Perth and other men like him "whose death-longing eyes still have some interior compunctions against suicide" that he has not been alone in his feelings. In "The Blacksmith," Ishmael arrives at an archetypal understanding of his descent: "Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored . . ." He understands that his descent has been a descent into symbolic death, but also that this death has led him to rebirth and to new life.

In "The Gilder," Ishmael makes his concluding summary view on the cycle of death and rebirth in life: "There is no steady unretracing progess in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy's un-conscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If." This cycle repeats itself, and "once gone through, we trace the round again, and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally." What is the reason for the cycle? Ishmael does not know. But with an optimistic resolve to face and accept the truth of his experience wherever it should lead him, Ishmael withdraws from the action into the detached role of omniscient narrator, his inner ascent to the heroic identity of a free and independent spirit symbolically complete. In "Fate," Emerson says, "A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet and serve him for a horse." Ishmael suffers through Ahab's tragedy, but his quest for inner freedom leads him through the three archetypal stages of ascent out of this tragedy, and when the Pequod goes down and the coffin rises to the surface, Ishmael is there to ride it.

Ishmael's criticism of the social land world makes him an outcast of American society like many another American hero. Like Cooper's Natty Bumppo, or Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, or Twain's Huck Finn, or Hemingway's Nick Adams, Ishmael finds himself on the frontiers of American society, both pushed out because there is no place for him in society and exiled by his own free will because he finds life in society intolerable. The land world professes ideals of liberty, but Ishmael's satire is an irrepressible attack upon the failures of that society to live up to such ideals. The individual freedom Ishmael seeks is the kind of freedom Frye describes as a romantic ideal when he says, "All societies, including the City of God, are free only to the extent that they arrange the conditions of freedom for the individual, because the individual alone can experience freedom." Ishmael cannot find conditions of true individual freedom on land; but however often the "ball of free will" may drop from his hands, he is still free within limits to seek freedom; and inspired with the romantic vision of an idyllic world of love and kindness, Ishmael frees himself from the tragic pessimism that destroys Ahab.

According to Frye, the quest romances fulfill the human desire for stories about the "unending, irrational, absurd persistence of the human impulse to struggle, survive, and where possible escape." "It so chanced" that Ishmael does escape the Pequod's catastrophe. The archetypal pattern of the experience he goes through is one of a symbolic death and rebirth, and Melville develops this theme encyclopedically in imitation of the pattern of Christ's death and resurrection, but the ideals of Christianity differ from the ideals of romance. The Christian epic myth is a comedy which contains a tragedy in which Christ is the quester who through his sacrifice redeems humanity and thus provides for the gathering together of the faithful in a heavenly society at the end of time. With the wisdom he attains through his experience of Ahab's tragedy, however, Ishmael is able to rescue his inner world from the dragon of oppressively self-limiting ways of thought and perception that inhibit or prevent his desire to envision an idyllic existence in this world for himself and for others.

Uniting the archetypal forms of romance, irony, and tragedy as it does, Moby-Dick is an encyclopedic romance, but one which ends in the tragic phase. Just as Jonah survives his trial in the belly of the dragon and proceeds to do his duty as God's prophet and cry out against the evils of Nineveh, so Ishmael survives his trial in the belly of Ahab's tragedy and returns to the land world to "preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood": he writes Moby-Dick. Jonah cries out against Nineveh, but God spares the city. As the Book of Jonah ends, Jonah, outside the city, is in such anger with God's decision not to punish the people that he weeps for his own death. In Moby-Dick, life on the land goes on, and after Ishmael is picked up by the Rachel, his story ends but his anger and frustration do not. Ishmael is forever Ishmael, a mocking outcast. He is also a Messianic visionary and prophet who foresees the idyllic existence that might be and who tells of it. But in the vision of Ishmael, humanity—not God or the "Son of man"—is its own creator and ruler.

Of all the literary forms, romance presents the most highly idealized dialectic between abhorrent and desirable world visions. In Moby-Dick Melville develops a dialectic between land and sea worlds. On land is the tyranny of civilized society and the conformity of the mediocre, the falsely patriotic, the ignorant, and the cowardly to the lies and hypocrisies of nation, race, religion, and every other established, organized, and accepted system, form, custom, and tradition of thought, feeling, and belief. Wherever a person might be and whatever his or her external circumstances, if the person is courageous and true and inspired with a vision of freedom, then our quest through the vast sea world of experience need never have an end. "But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God," Ishmael says in words that capture, perhaps better than any other, the spirit of Melville's guiding romantic idealism in Moby-Dick, "so better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety. For worm-like, oh! who would craven crawl to land!"

## Notes

## Chapter 1: The Dragon Quest

Herman Melville's "The Text of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale," in Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text; Before Moby-Dick: International Controversy; Reviews and Letters by Melville; Analogues and Sources; Reviews of Moby-Dick; Criticism, Second Edition, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2002).

But Moby-Dick is extremely impure art, it is a hybrid, one of the most audacious surely that have ever been conceived. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition, (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 100.

classification of Moby-Dick as a type of prose fiction is a difficult and unresolved question. Edward H. Roseberry, "Moby-Dick: Epic Romance," College Literature, II, No. 3 (Fall 1975), 170.

enveloping. "Careful Disorder." Herbert G. Eldridge, "'Careful Disorder': The Structure of Moby-Dick," American Literature, 39, No. 2 (May 1967), 156.

gothic novel. Robert D. Hume, "Gothic vs. Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," PMLA, 84, No. 2 (1969), 282-90.

primer for beginning students of cetology. Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949), 124

The book-maker and book-publisher had better do their work with a view to the trial it must undergo at the bar of God. The New York Independent, Nov. 20, 1851, in "Five Reviews not in Moby-Dick as Doubloon" by Hershel Parker, English Language Notes, IX, No. 3 (March 1972), 184.

Value-judgments are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value-judgments. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 20.

a field of study all its own. Frye, Anatomy, 6-7.

one of the first great mythologies to be created in the modern world. Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 193.

transformed into romances. Frye, Anatomy, 136-38. See also Frye, The Secular Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), 36.

making this myth a "reality" by offering a vision of it. Frye, Secular Scripture, 172-73. See also Frye, The Critical Path (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), 132-33.

Nathalia Wright's. Nathalia Wright, Melville's Use of the Bible (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1949), 43-102.

Egyptian myth. H.B. Kulkarni, "Moby Dick: A Hindu Avatar" in Monograph Series 18 (Logan, Utah: Logan State Univ., 1970); and H. Bruce Franklin, "3. Moby-Dick: An Egyptian Myth Incarnate" in The Wake of the Gods (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1963), 53-98.

From Ritual to Romance . . . The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920; rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957); and Sir James Frazer, The New Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (1890; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1959), 339-470.

inductive leap. Frye, Anatomy, 15.

by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery and the like. Frye, Anatomy, 162.

comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. Frye, Anatomy, 313.

the romance and the anatomy. Frye, Anatomy, 99 and 102.

underlying unit of design. Frye, Anatomy, 100.

Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville's novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward. Frye, Anatomy, 189

archetypal "dragon quest." Frye, Secular Scripture, 7. The discussion of "mythical" and "fabulous" literature which follows is from "1. The Word and World of Man" in Secular Scripture, 3-31.

greater authority to myth. Frye, Secular Scripture, 8.

"fabulous" literature. Frye, Anatomy, 107. The discussion of "ritual" and "dream" to follow is from Anatomy, 104-115.

identification of ritual and dream in which the former is seen to be the latter in movement. Frye, Anatomy, 106.

is neither limited to nor satisfied by objects. Frye, Anatomy, 106.

organs such as the heart or lungs. See Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Bollingen Series XX, v. 9, Part 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 160-161.

neither be accepted nor rejected. Frye, Anatomy, 111-112.

farming and architecture." Frye, Anatomy, 105.

Ritual is the "archetypal aspect of mythos" or plot; dream the "archetypal aspect of dianoia" or theme: Frye, Anatomy, 107.

imitation of dreams. Frye, Anatomy, 105.

The two basic kinds of archetypal symbols are thus cyclical and dialectical. Frye, Anatomy, p. 106. See also Frye, Secular Scripture, 79-80.

Comedy . . . Romance . . . Tragedy . . . irony. Frye, Anatomy. Frye presents the union of ritual and dream for each mythos in the separate sections in which he treats each mythos. Hence for comedy, see 163 and 167; for romance, see 187 and 193-94, and see also Secular Scripture, 53 and 149; for tragedy, see 148 and 214-15; and for irony, see 148, 214, and 226.

"apocalyptic," "idyllic," "ordinary," and "demonic." Frye, Secular Scripture, 97-98. See also 14-15.

There are two kinds of descent . . . The two kinds of ascent." Frye, Secular Scripture, 97 and 129.

the myth of Jonah. Frye, Anatomy, 190.

apocalyptic level. The discussion of the "apocalyptic" level is from Frye, "Theory of Archeytpal Meaning (1): Apocalyptic Imagery," in Anatomy, 141-46.

Displacement of an archetype. Frye, Anatomy, 142-43.

the highest point in the world, as it is geographically in Dante. Frye, Secular Scripture, 98. See also Frye, "Theory of Archetypal Meaning (3): Analogical Imagery," in Anatomy, 151-58.

displaced into a rioting mob. Frye, Anatomy, 149 and Secular Scripture, 98. The discussion of the "demonic" level is also from "Theory of Archetypal Meaning (2): Demonic Imagery" in Anatomy, 147-50. See also 151-54.

"realism" represents just as much a set of literary conventions as any other form. Frye, Anatomy, 140. Quotations around the term "realism" follow Frye's example in Anatomy.

His white color, for example, is the color of the "veil of the Christian's Deity" and yet also "the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Melville, 165.

long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. Melville, 323.

He descends into a lower world which is the demonic antithesis of his identity. Frye, Anatomy, 151, 186-87, and 195.

The term "encyclopedic" describes the thematic aspect of the work that formally imitates the scope and complexity of biblical and classical myth as a whole, or indeed of any of the world's great mythologies as a whole. Frye, Anatomy, 315.

The Bible forms, according to Frye, "two concentric quest myths"; one being the "Genesis-apocalypse" myth and the other the "Exodus-millennium" myth. Frye, Anatomy, 191.

anagnorisis. Frye, Anatomy, 187.

because its central theme of death, rebirth, and return imitates the epic quest theme of death, rebirth, and resurrection. Frye, Anatomy, 192.

the double then becomes a symbol of a false or self-destructive identity. Frye, Secular Scripture, 97-157. See esp. 102, 108, 117, and 140-44.

The classical myth from which this archetypal theme derives is the myth of Narcissus whose double is the shadow in the reflecting pool. Frye, Secular Scripture, 108.

Christ's human double becomes a tragic victim. Frye, Secular Scripture, 108.

by presenting not the "probable and ordinary course of man's experience" but rather the "fancy-pictures" which may almost be brought "into positive contact with the realities of the moment." Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Seymour L. Gross (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1967), 1 and 3.

cetological center. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby Dick, 121-367.

The use of the term "quest" in literary criticism is thus analogous to the use of the term "sonata form" in musical criticism. See Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Eric Blom (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1954), v. VII, 887.

The second movement or cetological center has an analogy to the long and expressive second movement of the symphony. See Grove's, 888.

The symphony links its movements together by contrasting yet related tonal variation created by changes in key from movement to movement. Grove's, 889.

Frye compares his mythoi to musical keys. Frye, Anatomy, 133.

interconnected group of suggestions. Frye, Anatomy, 3.

there are "gaps" in his descriptions and definitions of the archetypes. Frye, Anatomy, 3.

## Chapter 2: Descent to a Lower World

Ishmael wants "to see what whaling is," he wants "to see the world." Melville, 71.

That shadow is Ahab, the "ungraspable phantom of life," the "key to it all." Melville, 20.

"Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock," Ishmael says, "here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost." Melville, 189.

According to Frye, "reality" in romance is not the same thing as "reality" outside of romance. Frye, Secular Scripture, 35-61. See esp., 54. See also, Anatomy, 134-40; and Frye, The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), 38-55.

Frye says this other "reality" only occasionally resembles the "reality" of literature when life seems "almost on the point of making sense." Frye, Secular Scripture, 47.

Whether they actually do make sense or not, as Frye says, is fortunately not a matter for literary critics to decide. Frye, Secular Scripture, 48.

But as Frye says, the assumption that literary forms of "reality" are the same things as this other "reality" can only lead to . . . schizophrenia. Frye, Critical Path, 111.

The romantic hero descends from "reality" in the idyllic world. Frye, Secular Scripture, 54.

social setting reduced to the love of individual men and women within an order of nature which has been reconciled to humanity. Frye, Secular Scripture, 149.

Nearly the entire population, "thousands upon thousands of mortal men," is under the hypnotic spell of "ocean reveries." Melville, 18.

"Are the green fields gone?" Ishmael asks. "What do they here?" Melville, 19.

of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. Melville, 19.

cherish very nearly the same feelings toward the ocean. Melville, 18.

all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. Melville, 20.

. . . the result of life in society for Ishmael is such "hypos" that "it requires a strong moral principle" to keep him "from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Melville, 18.

"In fact take my body who will, Ishmael says in the Whaleman's Chapel, "take it I say, it is not me." Melville 45.

in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago. Melville, 45.

motif of amnesia. Frye, Secular Scripture, 102.

break in consciousness, one which often involves actual forgetfulness of the previous state. Frye, Secular Scripture, 102

may be internalized as a break in memory, or externalized as a change in fortunes or social context. Frye, Secular Scripture, 102.

I ain't insured. Melville, 36.

Call me Ishmael. Melville, 18.

to denote an exile or outcast. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, ed., Moby-Dick, Footnote 2, 18.

involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral . . . quietly take to the ship. Melville, 18.

invisible police officer of the Fates . . . constant surveillance. Melville, 21.

Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. Melville, 50.

"But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh? it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?" Melville, 71.

chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals. Melville, 158.

half humorous innuendos. Melville, 71.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. Melville, 24.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet," wherein a "black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit." Melville, 24.

"Modulations of the mirror image bring us to the pictures, tapestries, and statues which so often turn up near the beginning of a romance," Frye says, "to indicate the threshold of the romance world." Frye, Secular Scripture, 109.

Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion. Melville, 24.

"dilapidated" building with "one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly." Melville, 24.

It is "enough to drive a nervous man distracted." Melville, 26.

The picture "fairly froze" Ishmael to it. He feels compelled "to find out what that marvelous painting meant." Melville, 26.

"heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears" associated with "death harvesting." Melville, 27.

"through yon low-arched way" into the inn's public room, which is likened to the hold of a ship: ". . . you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously." Melville, 27.

"cracked glass cases filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks"; the other, with a "dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right whale's head." Melville, 27.

"like another Jonah" selling sailors "deliriums and death." Melville, 27.

eruption of bears from Labrador. Melville, 29.

huge favorite . . . stood almost six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. Melville, 29.

"announced" him to be a "Southerner." Melville, 29.

one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. Melville, 29.

deep, earnest thinking. Melville, 97.

Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up leaps thy apotheosis! Melville, 97.

kink in the neck. Melville, 33.

care of heaven. Melville, 33.

Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. Melville (33).

With one hand, Queequeg navigates a candle; with the other, he snatches a "new Zealand Head." Melville, 33.

nigh singing out with fresh surprise. Melville, 34.

bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Melville, 34.

giving a sudden grunt of astonishment . . . "Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!" Melville, 36.

"Such characters," Frye says, "are, more or less, children of nature, who can be brought to serve the hero, like Crusoe's Friday, but retain the inscrutability of their origin." Frye, Anatomy, 196-7.

It is not down on any map; true places never are. Melville, 59.

a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. Melville, 34.

has just the abilities the hero needs in a crisis. Frye, Anatomy, 197.

Hence every typical character in romance tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game. Frye, Anatomy, 195.

He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly . . . Melville, 191.

mundane amours. Melville, 191.

loomed up to thrice his real stature. Melville, 381.

Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body. Melville, 381.

sensations were strange. Melville, 37.

a somewhat similar circumstance. Melville 37.

whether it was a reality or a dream. Melville, 37.

cutting up some caper or other. Melville, 37.

supernatural hand, Mellville, 37.

frozen with the most awful fears. Melville, 37.

horrid spell. Melville, 37.

comical predicament. Melville, 38.

curiosity getting the better of his breeding. Melville, 38.

Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day. He and his ways were worth unusual regarding. Melville, 38.

curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen! Melville, 40.

out for a stroll. Melville, 41.

the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts . . . actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners. Melville, 41.

It makes a stranger stare. Melville, 41.

Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. Melville, 42.

In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of green and gold. Melville, 42.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. Melville, 42.

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket, and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stove my soul, Jove himself cannot. Melville, 45.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Proverbs 4:7.

must symbolize something unseen. Melville, 47.

Signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions. Melville, 47.

look again toward . . . holy temple. Jonah 2:4.

No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. Melville, 56.

"Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self." Melville, 54.

intuitions of some things heavenly. Melville, 293.

cannibal of a craft, Melville, 70.

original grotesqueness, Melville, 70.

Noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! Melville, 70.

old wise man. Frye, Anatomy, 195.

the way Merlin does Arthur, for example. Frye, Anatomy, 195.

"for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Melville, 76.

I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than a Jupiter Olympus with his head. Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, early May, 1851, in Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, 540.

high perception. Melville, 143.

vulture . . . feeds upon . . . heart for ever." Melville, 170.

his humanities. Melville, 79.

"Can't ye see the world where you stand?" Melville, 72.

a little staggered, Melville, 72.

"Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?" Melville, 71.

"He's a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He's a grand ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab: doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales." Melville, 78.

"old squaw Tistig, at Gay Head said that the name would somehow prove prophetic." Melville, 78.

"It's a lie." Melville, 78.

"Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish." Melville, 85.

One grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. Melville 22.

"Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" Melville, 94-95.

many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. Melville, 95.

The abandonment of the time and the place. Melville, 158.

the cold, damp night breeze blew between, a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled . . . gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic. Melville, 96.

pitiless. Melville, 95.

by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity . . . Melville, 136.

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. Melville, 152.

a thousand bold dashes of character, Melville, 73.

It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you my get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this. Melville, Letter to Richard H. Dana, Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast (1840), May 1, 1850, in Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, 533.

a large amount of the antiquated in it, which helps to enclose a romance like a glass case in a verbal museum. Secular Scripture, 110.

bold and nervous lofty language, Melville, 73.

special language. Secular Scripture, p. 110.

great democratic god . . . ascribe high qualities . . . tragic graces . . . meanest mariners. Melville, 103-4.

talisman of recognition, some emblem or object, a birthmark on the body, tokens put beside an exposed infant, and the like, which symbolizes the original identity. Frye, Secular Scripture, 145.

a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth. Melville, 366.

## Chapter 3: The Tearing Apart of "Reality"

pathos. Frye, Anatomy, 195

The opposite of romance is the mythos of irony and satire, which is the most unidealistic form. Frye, Anatomy, 223.

parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways. Frye, Anatomy, 223.

assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. Frye, Anatomy, 223.

Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral standard, the latter being essential in a militant attitude to experience. Frye, Anatomy, 224.

sources and values of conventions themselves. Frye, Anatomy, 229.

kidnapped. Frye, Secular Scripture, 57. Frye uses the term "kidnapping" to describe the process of the "absorbing" of the romance "into the ideology of an ascendant class."

business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit . . . all anxiety to convince . . . injustice . . . hunters of whales. Melville, 97.

If any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. Melville, 39.

selectest champions from the kingly commons. Melville, 104.

substitute for pistol and ball. Melville, 18.

one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. Melville, 21.

Sunken-eyed young Platonist . . . disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Melville, 135.

shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces. Melville, 22.

to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. Melville, 64.

"We cannibals must help these Christians." Melville, 64.

A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne. Melville, 273-74.

all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Melville, 54.

"riotous" lads out of "Yale or Harvard." Melville, 307.

There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. Melville, 300.

Seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death. Melville, 199.

As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. Melville, 306.

all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors. Melville 306.

Three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint. Melville, 217.

". . . the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a ticklish business, but must be done, or else it's no go." Melville, 240.

Toes are scarce among veteran blubber room men. Melville, 324.

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? . . . savage . . . King of the Cannibals." Melville, 242.

universal cannibalism of the sea. Melville, 225.

horrible vulturism of earth. Melville, 248.

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. Melville, 159.

feelingly. Melville, 153.

by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Melville, 153.

fabulous narrations . . . are almost fully equaled by the realities of the whaleman. Melville, 155.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. Melville, 156.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught. Melville, 159.

the badge of consternation in the other world . . . mortal trepidation here. Melville, 162.

in a milk-white fog—Yea while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. Melville, 162.

supernaturalism of this hue. Melville, 162.

very veil of the Christians' Deity. Melville, 165.

Heartless voids and immensities of the universe . . . the thought of annihilation. Melville, 165.

accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. Melville, 160.

Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul. Melville, 162.

phrensies of affright. Melville, 164.

the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Melville, 164.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! Melville, 164.

as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Melville, 164.

nothing but the charnel-house within. Melville, 165.

pictorial delusions. Melville, 215.

condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon. Melville, 194.

most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Melville, 225.

million of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. Melville, 367.

you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping . . . in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. Melville, 373.

when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang. Melville, 372.

gentle thoughts of the feminine air . . . to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue . . . mighty leviathans, sword-fish and sharks . . . strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. Melville, 404.

it was the only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them. Melville, 404.

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. Melville, 225.

green, gentle, and most docile earth. Melville, 225.

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. Melville, 247-48.

were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties. Melville, 237.

hash. Frye, Anatomy, 233.

And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren. Genesis 16:11-12.

wilderness. Genesis 17:20.

make him a great nation.

The biblical Ahab is a king of Israel who turns idolater. I Kings 16-22.

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that? Melville, 286.

sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin. Melville, 287.

not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind. Melville, 250.

Is but the image of the round globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Melville, 332.

Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! . . . Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. Melville, 247.

honey head. Melville, 273.

when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Melville, 261.

Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right. Melville, 261.

Titanism of power. Melville, 294.

"Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun!" Melville, 378.

say, rather secret intelligence from the Deity. Melville, 167.

There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed in the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy! Melville, 248.

My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely. Melville, 292.

Ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on . . . in the act of thinking deep thoughts. Melville, 293.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. Melville, 274-75.

read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings. Melville, 275.

however baby man may brag of his science and skill . . . to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make. Melville, 224.

clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter. Melville, 268.

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face. Melville, 296.

Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us. Melville, 196.

In pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. Melville, 196.

vast practical joke. Melville, 188.

the ghost is spouted up . . . away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again. Melville, 331.

secret . . . paternity lies in their grave . . . must there to learn it. Melville, 373.

been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. Melville, 344.

Naught was there but bones. Melville, 346.

Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories. Melville, 345.

Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. Melville, 348.

little cannibal urchins . . . the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play. Melville, 348.

recognition, separation from the demonic, and restoration of memory. Frye, Secular Scripture, pp. 129-57. See esp., 130, 137, and 145.

Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! Melville, 125.

Give me a Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Melville, 349.

Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael. Melville, 22.

immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. Melville, 354.

spout his frothed defiance to the skies. Melville, 354.

the counter irony. Frye, Secular Scripture, 124-26. The discussion of Ishmael's idealism is in terms of Frye's discussion of romantic idealism. The following comment is of particular importance: "But although in a world of death nothing is more absurd than life, life is the counter-absurdity that finally defeats death," 125.

The principle of the aristocracies of the past was respect for birth; the principle of fraternity in the ideal world of romance is respect rather for those who have been born, and because they have been born. Frye, Secular Scripture, 173.

## Chapter 4: The Death Struggle

brings about a morally intelligible downfall. Frye, Anatomy, 210.

The three-part quest pattern imitates the yearly revolution of the seasons from the death of vegetation during the wasteland period of the year in the fall and winter to the fertility and fructification of the land in spring and summer. Frye, Anatomy, 193-194.

the dream content of tragedy is the dream of omnipotence in which the hero, by upsetting the moral balance in nature, starts off an irreversible process toward catastrophe. Frye, Anatomy, 214-215.

If the double dies, his death can be seen as a sacrificial substitution for the hero's. Frye, Secular Scripture, 89 and 141-44.

In the medieval grail romances, the Fisher King figure is impotent and incapacitated by a sickness or leg wound. The following discussion of the Fisher King is from Frye, Anatomy, 189 and 191; Secular Scripture, 121; Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 12-24; and Robert Jaffray, King Arthur and the Holy Grail (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1928), 51-2, 113-27, and 211-12. See also Janet Dow, "Ahab: The Fisher King," Connecticut Review, 2 (April 1969), 42-9.

This wound symbolizes his sterility, and it reflects the ancient, magical connection between the king and his land. Frye, Secular Scripture, 121.

Hence, according to both Weston and Frye, the lance and grail have an analogy to male and female genital organs. Frye, Anatomy, 193-94; Secular Scripture, 121; and Weston, 75.

victory of fertility over the wasteland. Frye, Anatomy, 193.

his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin. Melville, 355.

non . . . in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli. Melville, 372.

The whole fallen world of sin and death and tyranny into which Adam fell. Frye, Anatomy, 190.

Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans. Melville, 113.

all evil. Melville, 156.

all the general rage and hate . . . his whole race from Adam down. Melville, 156.

The mythical Prometheus is a titan, one of a race of giants who preceded men on the earth in Greek mythology. The myth of Prometheus on which this discussion is based is the one presented by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound. See Greek Tragedies, v. 1, ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago and London: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), 65-105.

ungodly, god-like man. Melville, 78.

Other connections between Perth and Hephaestus include the facts that both are blacksmiths and both lame. John Satterfield, "Perth: An Organic Digression in Moby-Dick," Modern Language Notes, 74 (February 1959), 106-7.

intense thinking . . . vulture. Melville, 170.

cut away from the stake, when the fire has overruningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. Melville, 108.

Perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Melville, 108-09.

tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield . . . her strength. Genesis 4:12.

his last, cindered apple to the soil. Melville, 406.

Dionysus, the god of wine, who celebrates man's self-destructive impulses in frenzied, orgiastic rituals of dance and drunkenness. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans., Wm. A. Haussmann (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1964), 28-43 and 80.

one finds a "Dionysiac" aggressive will, intoxicated by dreams of its own omnipotence, impinging upon an "Apollonian" sense of external and immovable order. Frye, Anatomy, 214-15.

he also makes visible through his own tragedy all the beauty, mystery, and terror of human existence. Frye, Anatomy, 215.

Dionysus is torn to pieces by jealous titans but in some way resurrected by being pieced back together by his mother, Demeter, or raised from the dead by his father, Zeus. Sir James George Frazer, The New Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (New York: New American Library, 1959), 416-23.

trees in general. Frazer, 416.

great tree more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Frye, Anatomy, 207.

lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much more a mark for thunderbolts. Melville, 383-84.

stricken, blasted. Melville, 79.

vacating itself. Melville, 193.

desolation. Melville, 193.

the shrieks of the ocean. Melville, 194.

Cannon-ball, missent . . . turns up the level field. Melville, 414.

rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs . . . all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Melville, 415.

a Job's whale round the world. Melville, 158.

as Christ and Prometheus do. Frye, Anatomy, 42. Frye comments that by "justifying himself as a victim of God, Job tries to make himself into a tragic Promethean figure, but he does not succeed."

perfect and upright . . . feared God and eschewed evil. Job 1:1.

Possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. Melville, 157.

external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. Melville, 126.

innermost core of the tale of Prometheus is, as Nietzsche says, the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically striving individual. Nietzsche, 79.

The object of the quest to a lower world often takes the form of a treasure hoard guarded by the dragon. Frye, Secular Scripture, 121.

it is wisdom that is sought in the lower world . . . it is almost always wisdom connected with the anxiety of death in some form or other, along with the desire to know what lies beyond. Frye, Secular Scripture, 122.

like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Melville, 332.

Born in throes 'tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs. Melville, 333.

some form of scales or balance, the emblem of the law, and a sinister emblem because it quantifies, so to speak, all the elements of life that we feel cannot or ought not to be weighed or measured. Frye, Secular Scripture, 123.

the romantic hero's descent into and return from a night world has an analogy with the cyclical journey of the sun. Frye, Anatomy, 188.

the point at which the cyclical world of nature comes into alignment with the undisplaced apocalyptic level of the mythological universe, usually at the climactic turning point of the quest's ascent. Frye, Anatomy, 203-6.

as in the myth of Peter's betrayal of his friendship with Christ three times before the cock crows on the night Christ is betrayed. Matthew 26:75.

guilty thing. William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), 935.

God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued. Melville, 383.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. Daniel 5:25-31; Melville, 381.

happens, and happens impersonally. Frye, Anatomy, 209. The following discussion of the archetypal form of tragedy is from Anatomy, 206-23.

toward one inevitable outcome. Frye, Anatomy, 212.

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. Frye, Anatomy, 211.

". . . it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Melville, 202.

by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have done. Melville, 211.

a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. Melville, 199.

is in the position of refusing, or at any rate resisting, the tragic movement toward catastrophe. Frye, Anatomy, 218.

There is one God that is lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod—On deck! Melville, 362.

Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. Melville, 320.

What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Sais? Melville, 268.

the knowledge that he gains leads him to an early grave. Luther S. Manfield and Howard P. Vincent, ed., "Explanatory Notes" in Moby-Dick: or, The Whale by Herman Melville (New York: Hendricks House, 1952), 170-71.

was the great weaver who wove the world with her shuttle as a woman weaves cloth. Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Prometheus Press, 1959), 36-7.

I am all that has been, that is, and that will be. No mortal has yet been able to lift the veil that covers me. Larousse, 37.

determined shape of the life he has created for himself. Frye, Anatomy, p. 208 and 212-13.

forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Melville, 405.

Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? Melville, 406.

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? Melville, 406.

invisible power. Melville, 406.

Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? Melville, 407.

vital truth. Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Moses" in Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, 522.

weasel. Melville, 409.

salmon-like to Heaven. Melville, 415.

one of the teeth caught in a row lock . . . bluish pearl-white of the jaw . . . within six inches of Ahab's head. Melville, 410.

two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach. Melville, 416.

boiling maelstrom . . . like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch. Melville, 416.

drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires. Melville, 417.

some swift tide rip, at the mouth of a deep rapid stream. Melville, 407.

moving valley. Melville, 408.

sparkling . . . dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale. Melville, 415.

circling surface creamed like new milk . . . marble trunk. Melville, 422.

Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Melville, 425.

not made by mortal hands. Melville, 377.

Hemp only. Melville, 377.

man's insanity . . . heaven's sense. Melville, 322.

a living part of heaven. Melville, 427.

all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. Melville, 427.

Titanic impulse to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and to carry them on broad shoulders higher and higher, farther and farther. Nietzsche, 80.

But clear truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter. Melville, 268.

triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs. Melville, 415.

Descried the spout again, and instantly from the mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it. Melville, 420.

the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them. Manfield and Vincent, "By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont: Hawthorne and His Mosses," 522.

the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath. Job 42:7.

one in a whole nation's census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Melville, 73.

Ahab's titanic spirit passes out of the world of nature to unite with the mystery against which he has struggled. This comment on Ahab's catastrophe derives from one of Frye's comments on the archetypal tragic hero's fall: "With his fall, a greater world beyond which his gigantic sprit had blocked out becomes for an instant visible, but there is also a sense of the mystery and remoteness of that world." See Anatomy, 215.

## Chapter 5: Ishmael's Ascent

the regular symbol of the beginning and end of a cycle. Frye, Anatomy, 198.

ark or chest. Frye, Anatomy, 198.

another orphan. Melville, 427.

Jonah himself is a prototype of Christ. Frye, Anatomy, 190. Frye says that Christ "accepted" Jonah "as a prototype of himself . . ."

Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. Jonah 1:2.

But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. Jonah 2:9.

liberty, equality, and fraternity. Frye, Secular Scripture, 173.

understanding in all visions and dreams. Daniel 1:17.

Beautiful Necessity. Emerson, "Fate" in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957), 352.

Son of man. Daniel 7:13.

the time of the end. Daniel 7-12.

blue tranquil sky . . . aroma . . . spring violets . . . musky meadow. Melville, 322.

hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally . . . Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Melville, 323.

divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. Melville, 322.

long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. Melville, 322.

his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country. Melville, 323.

penseroso phase. Frye, Anatomy, 202-3. See also Secular Scripture, 150.

It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit. Melville, 326.

red hell . . . freighted with savages . . . material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul. Melville, 327.

Horrible oath, Melville, 322.

strange sort of insanity. Melville, 322.

fellow beings. Melville, 323.

fiend shapes. Melville, 327.

iron ball, closely netted. Melville, 211.

already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in. Melville, 211.

kindred visions in . . . soul. Melville, 327.

broken current of memory. Frye, Secular Scripture, 145.

which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. Melville, 328.

Millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. Melville, 328.

that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true or undeveloped. Melville, 328.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. Melville, 328.

broken-hearted. Melville, 369.

more oblivious than death. Melville, 369.

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored . . . Melville, 369.

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. Melville, 373.

once gone through, we trace the round again, and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Melville, 373.

A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet and serve him for a horse. Emerson, "Fate," in Selections, 351.

All societies, including the City of God, are free only to the extent that they arrange the conditions of freedom for the individual, because the individual alone can experience freedom. Frye, Secular Scripture, 172.

ball of free will. Melville, 179.

unending, irrational, absurd persistence of the human impulse to struggle, survive, and where possible escape. Frye, Secular Scripture, 136.

It so chanced. Melville, 427.

Christ is the quester who through his sacrifice redeems man and thus provides for the gathering together of the faithful in a heavenly society at the end of time. Frye, Secular Scripture, 92.

preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood. Melville, 53.

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God, so better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety. For worm-like, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Melville, 97.

###

## About the author:

A garden is an ideal or archetype that gives the Earth (Urth) a human shape. Garden Urthark is an enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.

## Cover art by Sung Kim:

"The Illustrated Northrop Frye," 2007, oil on canvas, 20" x 16."

## About the Artist:

Raised in South Korea, Sung Kim is a naturalized American citizen who came to the United States to study art. Sung is deaf. She received a BA in Art from Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university in the world for deaf people.

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