I’m going to spoil Moby-Dick. Because I want to talk about it.
Generally I don’t like to spoil any books, even books that are 170 years old. There is a certain respect in not spoiling literature, and I like to stick to that whenever I can.
If you haven’t read this long, arduous book, but you want to, go read it now. When you’re done in 12 weeks, come back and pick up here at the fourth paragraph.
Moby-Dick is a story about an extreme personality. It’s a book about Captain Ahab and his vengeful mission against the whale who took his leg.
The name of the ship is the Pequod; it is your standard, everyday whaling ship with a standard, everyday whaling crew. They sail first cross the Atlantic Ocean, killing standard, everyday whales along the way. The crew do not yet know quite what they’ve gotten themselves into.
As the Pequod crosses the Indian and then the Pacific, Ahab rallies his crew to support his chase. His monomaniacal vision is leading him one place and one place only, and that place is wherever the White Whale resides. They have to search all of planet Earth’s water for one whale. Through his rhetoric (and fear), Ahab earns the cooperation of his crew.
Upon hearing tell of the whale’s whereabouts, Ahab rallies his crew yet harder and further demands their cooperation. Ship after defeated ship inform Ahab that Moby Dick is on his current path if he keeps sailing east. So Ahab sails east.
His crew, in particular his own chief mate, begin airing their misgivings about his mission. Starbuck gives Ahab a speech about how irresponsible it is to singularly pursue the White Whale, when all he does is eat harpoons and kill people. They say that if you’re after revenge you should dig two graves; in Starbuck’s opinion, Ahab is digging about fifty.
At one point Starbuck even points a gun at Ahab through the door of his quarters. Because he feels confident that Ahab takes the sailors to their ruin, and that he alone understands and can end it. But some murky combination of conscience, guilt, and duty stops him.
So Starbuck drops the gun and Ahab sails on.
The closer the Pequod gets to its destination, the more signs the world sends her crew that things are approaching a climax. Ship after ship with broken men and broken boats pass them. Story after story they are told about how many harpoons decorate the White Whale’s back, and yet he swims as strongly as ever. A storm almost ruins them.
Finally, far out in the Pacific, they catch up to their quarry, and they assault him for three days. Ahab loses his false leg, again. They lose a crew member. They lose all except their backup-of-backup boats. On day three, Captain Ahab goes into the water one more time.
And everyone except Ishmael dies.
The White Whale was too powerful, and Ahab did not have his revenge. He sank himself, his ship, and an entire crew of good men with families. The White Whale was not captured. The Pequod was broken unceremoniously, and Ahab didn’t even die a hero’s death. He did not even die a glorious death. He died the death of an average man at sea, lost and forgotten.
Now the question is, how important is that ending to what we take from the story?
Herman Melville could have made day three of The Chase an ending where Moby Dick finally succumbed to his wounds and stopped swimming. Melville could have made it, for lack of a better word, a happy ending.
How important is it that he didn’t?
Moby-Dick is a story about man’s desire for the big elusive thing, the big victory; or, more specifically, man's desire for revenge. As it is, the lesson you’d take from the story is that revenge is a fool’s errand. That it’s the ego’s way of finishing off the injured body and soul. That Ahab’s lust for redemption achieved nothing and cost everything.
But what if Ahab had his redemption? What if the White Whale was captured?
Would we hate Ahab a little less? Would I be less inclined to compare him to Benito Mussolini? Would Moby-Dick be less likely considered “the great American novel”?
Would it invalidate the crew’s misgivings?
How many people would still have died? Would it still be the same moral, if 1 extra person had died before Moby Dick was killed? If 5 extra people were killed? If everyone except Ahab was killed?
Where do we draw the line between different outcomes and what they mean artistically? How much death or life is needed before the meaning of the story completely changes?
Unfortunately, Moby-Dick is not an average childhood story with a clear moral. Or at least, it might not be.
What we remember about Moby-Dick is two monsters.
If Ahab had killed the whale who took his leg, we might celebrate him as a hero of literature. We might overlook his tragic flaws the way we overlook the flaws of tech CEOs and world-shaking capitalists. Instead of being inclined to think “Ahab was controlled by his ego like Narcissus,” we might be inclined to think “Ahab pushed just far enough, like Hercules.”
Instead of “sometimes the right thing to do is quit,” we might take the lesson “the right thing to do is never quit.”
Survivorship bias is a psychological/sociological phenomenon by which we tend to remember only the winners. Nobody writes newspaper articles about how many people a year lose all their money in the stock market. You only hear about Buffett and Dalio. Nobody writes about how some teenage athlete almost went pro and almost lifted his family out of poverty, but just didn’t quite practice enough his senior season. People write about LeBron James.
Sometimes a hero is someone who did all the ridiculous, insane, unexplainable things and got a little lucky. And sometimes someone else did all those same things and didn't get lucky, and you never heard his name.
Whenever we hear a story, what we learn from it is informed or even completely determined by the ending.
But sometimes the moral of the story is whatever your taste wants the moral of the story to be. Moby-Dick is a book that requires taste. All of life requires taste.
To me, Ahab is a perfectly understandable ego-driven maniac who sees only one way forward in life. I’m the same way. And I think everybody needs a little bit of that inside. It’s the only way you can be anything other than forgettably regular.
But my taste cannot leave alone his selfishness, either. He went too far. There are some enemies too big. Sometimes you just have to accept that a whale ate your leg and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it.
Drink some water and pick a hard but winnable fight.
JDR
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.” - Oscar Wilde
Haven’t read it but I want to 😁 thanks for the disclaimer
Very interesting point of view. I’m with your thinking.