Ishmael Is Destined To Be An Underling To Captain Ahab, A Moody Stricken Man Who

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Term Paper Title	Ishmael Is Destined To Be An Underling To Captain Ahab, A Moody Stricken Man Who
# of Words	1135
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.54

Ishmael is destined to be an underling to Captain Ahab, a "moody stricken" man who stood before his crew "with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." (Ch.28). Ahab sees Moby Dick as a supernatural source of all man's torments:
He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. (Ch.36).
[Ahab] cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before his as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung .... All that most maddens; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. (Ch. 41).
Ahab is a kind of anti - theodicean who propels his ship and crew on a single - purposed mission to destroy the very source of evil in the world, which Ahab perceives in Moby Dick.
Often, Melville identifies the mystic force of the whale at, - an agent, or principle of God:
... let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the Sperm Whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies of air over his head. For what are the terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God. (Ch.24)
If Moby Dick is a force of God, then Ahab can be seen as a deicidal force leading his crew in rebellion against God. And all the crew, save Starbuck, shares to some degree Ahab's hate for God's agent of suffering and woe:
I, Ishmael, was alone of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and sore did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge. (Ch.41).
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