Salvation/Damnation: The Ambiguous Faust in Melville's Moby-Dick

Abstract

The word “intertextual” hardly prepares us for the complex literary web within which Herman Melville suspends his metaphysical adventure story about a great whale and a man obsessed with the meaning of his own striving to capture it. Melville‘s allusions are ostentatious – to the Bible, including the Book of Jonah, Shakespeare‘s tragedies, countless accounts of whales and whaling, philosophers such as Plato, Locke, and Kant, and dozens of what Melville call “higgledy-piggledy” bits of ocean lore. The effect is to make what is on one hand a very flashy adventure story into something equally as engaged with books and the stories of the past. The Faust story, whose hero indulges his desire for knowledge to the point of losing his soul, is an apt precursor for Melville‘s Captain Ahab, who turns a routine whaling voyage into a quest for transcendence. Is the white whale a divine “agent or principle,” or just meaningless “pasteboard mask”? Ahab, like Faust, is willing to lose everything in order to know.

-Dr. Bruce Greenfield