Реферат: Moby Dick 2 Essay Research Paper Moby

view. Despite the relative benignness of the novel?s previous leviathans,

Melville makes the White Whale markedly different: “Moby Dick seemed

combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.” (715)

Despite the seemingly lunacy implied by Ahab?s insistence that the White

Whale is an evil force, the ruthless efficacy with which Moby Dick defends

himself seems to vindicate Ahab in the end. It is this mutual malevolency

that is the impetus for the downward spiral of violence begetting violence

that culminates in the mutual destruction of Ahab and Moby Dick. In being

left to valuate the respective fates of Ishmael and Ahab, the reader is

forced to examine what each character has accomplished or lost in his

choice of actions. Ishmael is fortunate enough to be the sole survivor of

the Pequod, but it is left unclear to what traumas he faces. Ahab

ultimately succeeds in his goal, but does so at the expense of his life,

his ship and his crew. Melville makes no attempt to delineate for the

reader a moral hierarchy, and in doing so, completes the ambiguity. The

reader is then left with the possibility of assigning symbolic relations

between the characters. If looked at from the grandest scale, it is

possible to see the whale and the sea as a morally ambivalent cosmos. If

so, then the fault of Ahab and the crew of the Pequod is their futile

attempt to master a force of nature far beyond their comprehension, and

are destroyed for it. The image of Ishmael floating helplessly upon the

ocean, without even the wreckage of the Pequod then becomes a strikingly

lonely image of humanity adrift in a universe neither good nor evil.

31c