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Reading Response: 2

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Moby Dick with its sea like vastness and depth does not let its readers determine or confine its worth to a fixed or final meaning. In my reading of the novel, one of its prominent features is Melville’s portrayal and study of sperm whales and whaling as a yardstick to measure and analyze human nature and civilization. He does not seem to idealize one realm over the other (civilization and wilderness) but it is his scientific and metaphysical study of sperm whales that interestingly indulges him to ponder on human civilization.

His cytological account of sperm whales does not restrict itself to science only but expands and connects with a series of philosophical dimensions of human beings as the center of so-called civilization. After describing the interesting details about the adjustment of blood temperature in sperm whales in the cold poles of the world, he questions his readers dramatically and surprisingly, “Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it” (316). Melville seems to invigorate the necessity of human individuality that seems often absent in the heartless and mindless crowd. He also views that human crowd is not only void of any individual interiority and “spaciousness” but also stands at extreme in its madness and fanaticism. When he talks about the commotion and turmoil created by Pequod in the undisturbed world of whales and their young whales, he does not forget to highlight, “there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men” (394). While mentioning the gory and fanatic whale hunt as undertaken by the crew of Pequod, he seems to associate his environmentalist or anti-anthropocentric voice with his social and colonial critique. The dying sperm whale looks for pity in vain, “But pity was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the...