The Unwitting Vehicle for Evil in Moby Dick :: Moby Dick Essays

The Unwitting Vehicle for Evil in Moby Dick My opinion about symbolism in the book Moby Dick is a patchwork of the "Evil Captain" theory and the "Nothingness" theory. In this theory chance and circumstance cause an unlucky (as opposed to ill-fated) captain to become the unwitting vehicle for evil. It is not his fault, he is driven to it by simple bad luck, and so evil is created out of nothingness, and then disappears from whence it came. The whale represents nothing, Starbuck represents nothing, Pip only serves to represent the madness that would have overtaken Ahab had he not invented an evil whale to blame his leg on, and most importantly Ishmael represents God, or the truth, or something I haven't thought up a name for yet. One thing that surprised me about this book was how contradictory the wording was. Sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters were quite simply put to the ax and cut short as if Herman changed his mind upon further contemplation. At first I thought that Herman had A.D.D. but soon I figured that he was playing the old trick on us. That is, he was intentionally being non-descript in order for everyone to interpret the book in a different way (its such a common trick now that I look back, but it really had me for a while). In the beggining the quote reads, "Whales in the sea, Gods will obey," as if Moby Dick was beyond a force of nature, a tool of consummate evil, but by the end the book the quote reads normal, "Whales in the sea, God's will obey" (notice the possessive apostrophe missing in the first one?[thank you for misquoting]). An example of this type of contridiction of ideas occurs between pages 197 and the last page: Aside from the more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpower all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in comprehensible form. 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.