We have written before about why the great American novel is about a whale. But return to Moby-Dick a second time and it is not the whale that haunts you — it is the man who hunts it. Captain Ahab is the most terrifying portrait of obsession in literature, and the most magnificent.
A whale took his leg; Ahab has decided to take revenge on the universe. He knows the hunt is madness, knows it will drown his ship and every soul aboard, and cannot stop — because to stop would mean admitting that his suffering is meaningless, that the whale is only a whale and not the mask of some malignant God. ‘I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,’ he says. He would rather destroy the world than accept that it is indifferent to him.
That is why Ahab outlives his century. He is every leader who drags a whole people into the sea to satisfy a private wound; every one of us who has ever preferred the grandeur of our grievance to the humility of letting go. Melville gives him the language of Shakespearean tragedy and lets him damn himself in it, gloriously.
The whale is the mystery. Ahab is the meaning.
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