Moby Dick Good and Evil Term Paper

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From the viewpoint of Melville scholar Lawrence Cleveland, the character of Captain Ahab, the sole master of the whaling ship the Pequod, "lost his leg to Moby Dick" which makes him "the victim of an attack by a vicious animal" ("Captain Ahab," Internet) in the form of a giant albino sperm whale. Yet by the time one reads Chapter 36 of the novel, it becomes clear that Ahab, named after a biblical figure that was married to Jezebel "who sponsored false prophets and gods, killed true ones and destroyed altars devoted to the Lord or Jehovah" (Smith, 267), is now a man possessed and "obsessed with destroying Moby Dick," due to the having lost his leg to the mighty jaws of the mysterious and terrifying white whale, humped with a crooked back and pierced by lances from past attempts to kill him.

By Chapter 37, the reader is convinced that Ahab is mad, for he admits "I am demonic, I am madness maddened!" (Melville, 436) as a result of his fanatical pursuit of Moby Dick, a fanaticism which reflects Ishmael's description of a religion which is "frantic" and produces "positive torment." As proof of Ahab's madness, the following passage reveals the so-called dark underbelly of the beast, the quintessential evil element in Moby Dick:

Aye, aye! It was that accursed white whale that razed me... I'll chase him round Good

Hope and round the Horn and round the Norway Maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! To chase that white whale... till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!" (Melville, 432).

Although it cannot be disputed that Moby Dick itself stands as a symbol of evil, due to removing Ahab's leg and the limbs of many other past pursuers and being responsible for the drowning deaths of untold numbers of Nantucket whalers over the years, he has only reacted as such because his very existence was threatened by mankind in the form of hunting and harpooning; in essence, Moby Dick was simply protecting himself and reacted as any wild animal would to threats of death.

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Simultaneously, Captain Ahab's obsession to destroy the white whale is also evil, for only true evil can be found in man, rather than in animals. Thus, "the evil that Moby Dick appears to have is the (same) evil within Captain Ahab" who has "projected his own feelings and instincts onto Moby Dick" (Cleveland, Internet).

This pervasive sense of evil in Captain Ahab is very closely related to the human trait of perversity or the turning away from what is good and acceptable in the eyes of society. Since a mammal such as Moby Dick cannot express evil in the human sense, then all of the evil in the novel emerges from the personality of Captain Ahab. But what exactly is evil? According to Ahab himself, all men hide behind "pasteboard masks" and there is "some unknown but still reasoning thing" that creates the moldings of the mask's features. In essence, this "reasoning thing" is the devil, Satan, the dark angel fallen from God's heaven and it manifests itself behind Ahab's own mask. Simply put, Ahab would "strike the sun if it insulted me" (Melville, 376), an indication that he would strike the face of God if needed. In conclusion, we have young Ishmael, the "good" protagonist, paradoxically aligned with Ahab who throughout the novel "may try to establish himself as a hero, but in the end, deep down and beneath his pasteboard mask is evil incarnate" (Townsend, 56)......

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