Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851, and it sold poorly, because the reading public wanted an adventure novel about whaling and Melville gave them a nine-hundred-page philosophical treatise about a man who is angry at God and has decided to express that anger by killing a whale. Captain Ahab lost his leg to the white whale Moby-Dick, and the loss broke something in him that was more structural than a limb. He does not want revenge. He wants to punish the universe for being the kind of place where a whale can take a man's leg, and the whale is simply the largest available target for that grievance.

Dr. Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, in his study of Melville, has argued that Ahab is the first truly modern character in American literature, a figure whose rage is directed not at any specific wrong but at the conditions of existence itself. Moby-Dick is a whale. He is also, to Ahab, the wall behind which the unknowable malice of the universe hides. Ahab wants to strike through the wall. He wants to confront whatever is behind the visible world, and if that confrontation requires his ship, his crew, and his life, then the cost is acceptable because the alternative is living in a universe that hurt him and pretending it did not.

The Crew That Followed a Madman

Ahab's ability to command loyalty while pursuing an obviously suicidal mission is Melville's most unsettling achievement. Starbuck, the first mate, sees the madness clearly. He knows Ahab is leading them to destruction. He cannot stop it because Ahab's conviction is so total, so articulate, so genuinely charismatic that it overwhelms rational objection. Ahab does not lie to his crew. He tells them exactly what he intends. They follow because his certainty fills a void that their own rationality cannot.

The Whale That Was Just a Whale

The greatest irony of Moby-Dick is that the whale does not care. Moby-Dick is not evil. He is not symbolic of anything, from his own perspective. He is a sperm whale doing what sperm whales do. All the meaning, all the rage, all the cosmic significance that Ahab projects onto the whale exists entirely in Ahab's mind. The whale is just the whale. And Ahab dies trying to kill a thing that was never his enemy, which is Melville's final comment on the human habit of turning suffering into narrative.