Well, here we are at last.

Friends, we’ve come to the end of the road. After this, there’s simply no more book to read. Oh, I may come around and do some sort of official wrap-up post, sum things up, but I would prefer to leave it all on the field, so to speak. Part of me can’t believe I actually got all the way to the end, much like when I read this book the first time, all those years ago. But I did! Or at least, I will shortly.

Summary

Ishmael reveals that one person did survive the wreck of the Pequod.

He also reveals that he, in fact, was the one who stepped into Fedallah’s place on Ahab’s whaling boat. After being knocked out of the boat and left behind, he floated far away from the main action of the previous chapter. Later, when the vortex finally collapsed, the life buoy, Queequeg’s unused coffin, shot out of the water right next to him.

For a day and a night, Ishmael floated on the ocean, totally alone. The sharks ignored him completely. Then he was found and picked up by the Rachel, which was still searching for its captain’s son.

Analysis

So there you have it! That is how our author survived. Very funny that this was left out of the British edition, which was published first, leaving everyone confused about who was supposed to have written this book.

So, let’s get into the big question, since the content of the epilogue is very brief and straightforward: what’s it all about? Why write this book? What meaning can we glean from its meandering tale of adventure and woe, from its philosophical musings and deep emotional longings?

Why Ishmael Wrote It

This one is pretty easy to answer, I think. As I’ve said before, Ishmael is writing this in order to process his grief.

This insanely traumatic and tragic thing happened to him, and he had to go on living his life, as the sole survivor. He had to be the sole bearer of the story of the Pequod, it’s no wonder he became obsessed and starting building up the mythology of the thing in his mind.

As a fictional character, I find Ishmael one of the most fascinating in this book, because most of what we know about him is by implication. He spent many years as a whaler, and as a researcher and chronicler of all aspects of whaling. Researching all the old tomes, interviewing subjects of interest, looking up old legal cases just to provide the most thorough examination of the topic that he could possibly give.

And that was all procrastination. The reason this book is so god damn long is that he doesn’t want to get to the part where everyone dies. Lingering in the details, getting deep into Ahab’s psychology, examining every aspect of the whale and categorizing every species; it’s all procrastination. It’s all avoiding the topic that he dreads the most, the incontrovertible fact that his captain went crazy and got everyone on the ship killed.

Think of this: what parts of this story could be corroborated by others? The gams with the other whaling ships, and those alone. All that Ahab did at just about every one of those meetings was ask about the whereabouts of Moby Dick! That, then, is the one solid thing that cannot be avoided by Ishmael, in writing his version of events.

So, the white whale takes center stage. Ishmael couldn’t have known Ahab’s internal thoughts, so he must extrapolate and build this legend of a man who feels himself insulted by god. If they’re all doomed, then that doom may as well be important. It may as well be biblical and shakespearean and all those other things that indicate status and importance in literature!

One might say that Moby Dick; or, the Whale is a bright, shining epitaph by Ishmael, for his long-dead crewmates. What is better than a dozen words on an empty grave in New Bedford? Two hundred thousand words in print! Lionizing them, turning them into demigods and philosophers, extolling the virtues of their craft.

Both the process of writing the book and having the book in the world, for others to read, are therpeutic, in their own way. Being witnessed in his grief, in his loss, is what Ishmael needs. He carried this burden along for so many years, and finally he can lay it all down in one place. No wonder, then, that it is so very long, so detailed, and so complete.

Why Melville Wrote It

Okay, that’s enough of the so-called Watsonian perspective, let’s step out of fiction and talk about our Doyle: Herman Melville.

After the roaring success of his south seas adventure novels, Typee and Omoo, why would he write this bizarre book that goes off on all these weird tangents? Why not have more actual things happening in the story? He’s certainly capable of it! Not only in those other books, but in the opening chapters of this one, which are far more conventional.

Now, I’m not gonna do a deep dive on Melville’s biography or anything like that, because I don’t know much about it. I’m no scholar, and this is no literary analysis, just some things I think, as a layperson, so to speak. Indeed, it’s important to keep in mind that biography is not destiny, people can write about all kinds of things only tangentially related to their own personal experiences. Also, death of the author and so on and suchlike.

Rather, I am here to speculate about the impetus for this change in tack, and why this novel is written the way that it is, on the subject that it is. Famously, Melville did work as a whaler… but only briefly. He did not complete a voyage, jumping ship in the South Pacific. He did not live Ishmael’s life! He was not on a doomed crew, he did not spend the rest of his life in grief over that loss, he did not witness the raw power of nature in that particular way.

What Melville did, though, is work as a common sailor. He was just another body on many different boats, working under different bosses in many different conditions. While it may not be extensive experience as a whaler, this seems to have given him an appreciation for the perils of this kind of work, and the ways that the life and livelihood of sailors is subject to the fickle whims of both their superiors and nature.

Thus, my theory is that the impetus for Moby Dick is twofold: reading the story of the sinking of the Essex, and the ache of knowing that the story will be ignored and lost to time, and just how unjust that is.

Melville’s motive for writing this book is similar to Ishmael’s, of course, but it is much broader, and less specific. Rather than mourning a specific incident that affected him personally, he is mourning an entire class of human beings who are not given proper respect because their efforts are not visible to those for whom they labor. And because they have no way in to the literary world, which might record their lives for posterity.

Ishmael wants to write an epitaph for his old crewmates, but Melville is writing an epitaph for everyone’s crewmates, essentially. All those people who are ignored and denigrated by society for whatever reason, who are not appreciated in the backbreaking pain and effort to enable a life they may never know.

This is me bringing it back around to atheism and anticapitalism.

I’m grasping at something here… perhaps that same thing that old Herman was, nearly 200 years ago. There is… a pain that comes with thinking about the efforts, the blood sweat and tears, that goes into enabling the life that you live without thinking about it. For the unknown and ungrieved, those who do not have plays and novels written about them, who are not deified in song and story, but simply go about their work anyway.

It is an injustice so deep and so inexorable, a gulf that cannot be crossed. Work that is rendered invisible cannot be properly compensated with all the treasures of heaven.

A modern Moby Dick could be written about fishermen, certainly, but it may also be about janitors. It may be about factory workers assembling phones in China. Longshoremen unloading containers, truckers moving them, employees stocking shelves at a supermarket. Roofers risking their lives at rates many times higher than police, who will never know the type of propoganda that raises their profession to a nigh-invincible cultural status.

I don’t know that this book contains a proposed balm to this pain, so much as it is intended to be that balm, at least for one of the world’s many neglected professions. There is no such thing as unskilled labor, but Melville chose a profession that is a) extremely dangerous b) completely invisible and c) provides an incredibly valuable resource that many people take for granted. Especially the higher classes of society!

Overall, in terms of its opposition to both capitalism and religion and American society of the 19th century in general, Moby Dick has one message: Don’t be mean to my friends, they deserve better. It is a howl of anguish, showing how the rememdies offered by these institutions are inadequate, and accomplish nothing but pushing the true problems to the side and under the rug.

Think now back to the whaleman’s chapel in New Bedford, way back in chapter 7:

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.

This is Ishmael basically saying that the idea of eternal reward via bodily resurrection is bullshit, because it means that his friends will never get to enjoy it. They’re doomed for eternity, just because they died in the course of doing a job far from land. Because of a cosmic accident. What sin could be great enough for complete nullity? What faith rewards with nothing but endless darkness at the bottom of the ocean for all time?

He goes on to speculate that perhaps those teachings are all wrong, and it doesn’t have to work that way. Starting the project of building up his own mythology and theology, to escape the trap that has been built for him and all who ply their trade upon the sea.

This is the thing in this book that pierces my heart, specifically.

Indeed, here are my two favorite lines in the whole book, which are in conversation with one another.

First, also from chapter 7:

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

And then, spoken in a low murmur by Starbuck as he gazes at the sea in chapter 114:

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

People like Starbuck are faithful, they believe with their whole heart, and what is their reward? To be cast into the abyss forever. To have their hopes come to naught and sink to the bottom of the ocean, to fail in their endeavour and have their physical body destroyed.

We all hold in our heart the thing that will destroy and betray us in the end. We can’t help it. The institutions of the world are evil and seek only to pull the wool over our eyes, but we cannot live any other way. At least, that is what they would tell us, what they would convince us until we hold that in our heart as our dearest, most treasured truth.

The perpetuation of these great crimes is on all our heads, and none of them. This is the unspeakable, ineffable, untouchable thing that cannot be struck by mortal hands. The idea, the philosophy, the institution itself, the culture that strangles and binds us.

But from the other side of that wall of encircling faith… the pain. The ache deep in your heart: this isn’t fair! This can’t be right! There must be a better way!

And that’s the impetus for writing this book.

Wrapping Up

Well, that’s that.

Ultimately, this great and mysterious tome doesn’t offer any easy answers, or indeed any answers at all. The microcosm for it within the story is that old besmoked oil painting that Ishmael sees in the Spouter-Inn; something you need to sit and study and talk to others about before you can finally discern its shape and intentions. But even that may not be correct.

That’s great art for you! It engages some primal emotion, it touches something deep inside your soul, and you just have to sit there and gnaw on it like a dog for the rest of your life.

Ultimately, that’s the benefit of engaging with as much art as possible. Go read those famous old classics. Check out that weird avant-garde movie house. You never know when you might find another bone for your pile.

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Alright, it’s all done.

I’m sure I will continue to have thoughts and feelings about Moby Dick in the future, but for this particular six-year period of my life, it’s all on the record now.

I’d like to thank everyone who commented, everyone who wrote me an email with the contact form, and everyone who read so much as a single word of my work. It was nice to be witnessed in my aimless rambling and pontificating.

I promise I will continue to write, but it may not be for a little while. I have many ideas, some more mundane and reasonable, and some insane and grand. You know how it is.

Until next time, shipmates!