Walking the Wall

…and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be sepnt in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. (Moby Dick, 39)

While there were many moments of laughing, grinning, and shaking my head while reading Moby Dick, mostly from Melville’s incredible grasp of language and imagery (ie, "The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul" [321]), the book itself was one of terrible sadness. There is an enormous sense of the arrogance of humanity in its reading, and even though Ahab seems to recognize that in the end, he is driven to stay the "fixed purpose [that] is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run" (143). The narrator wants to assert the inherent right of free will on humanity, but he seems to suggest it is really only an illusion and that we are all set on iron rails by the fates. There was the feel of Homer’s Odyssey, that just as Ulysses was the Greek attempt to yell "No!" to the gods and form their own destiny, Ahab was Melville’s attempt to yell "No!" to God and wrest some control over life. Unfortunately Ahab learned what Emerson noted in his essay "Fate" that men take note of: "We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust" (263, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry).

But while Ahab slams at Fate with all his fatal courage, he never reaches the understanding that Emerson did, that it is the "revelation of Thought [that] takes man out of servitude into freedom" and that: "Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks he is free" (269).