- Argument1 of 3›
Whale Represents Revenge
The novel is narrated by a sailor named Ishmael, who is named after the biblical character, who is the illegitimate son of Jacob/Israel and his maidservant Hagar. At the beginning of the novel, Ishmael attends a church service at the Whaleman's Chapel in New Bedford, where he hears a sermon about Jonah's experience with a whale. He hears about how Jonah cried out to God and was saved. While staying at a local inn, he meets up with Queequeg, a Polynesian sailor who will later go on the same ship with him. At first Ishmael is frightened of Queequeg, for he has tattoos on his body, even on his face. He later realizes that Queequeg is actually a nice person and the two men become friends. Despite their differences in culture, appearance, and religion, they get along well. When the two men enlist on the "Pequod" they do not see their captain at all for quite a while. Captain Ahab (named for a wicked king in the Bible) is in his quarters, healing from losing his leg in a whale hunt. He is also brooding the loss of his leg badly. When Captain Ahab finally arises from his quarters, he calls all the men to a meeting. The men see his prosthetic leg made of a whale's jawbone. He tells them that he wishes to have the whale who took his leg killed as soon as possible. He even gives them an incentive, saying that he will give the man who finds the whale a gold Spanish coin. He nails the coin to the main mast of the ship. The hated whale would be easy to spot, for white whales are very rare. It likely has leucism, which means that it lacks pigment, yet is not the same as albinism, which would be the entire lack of pigment. The whale's name is Moby Dick. The quest for revenge has Captain Ahab so consumed that he cannot sleep well at night. He does not want to even lay in his bed, but rests in a chair. When a large pod of whales is discovered, he meets up with another whaling captain who has also lost a limb to the white whale. Captain Boomer talks with Ahab, and he shows him his prosthetic arm also made of a whale's jawbone. Captain Boomer has a metal mallet attached to the end of it. He says that it is useful, for it has helped him in tapping kegs of ale and whacking unruly sailors. Captain Ahab hopes that he has found a kindred spirit in hunting Moby Dick. He finds that Captain Boomer does not have any ill will towards the whale. He wishes to only get back to whaling in general and does not care if the whale is killed or not. Captain Ahab decides to leave the large pod of whales once Captain Boomer tells him that he last saw Moby Dick at the Horn of Africa. Captain Boomer then wants nothing to do with Ahab and goes back to his ship. Ahab then turns the ship around and sails straight for Africa. That part of the ocean is a very dangerous place for ships, for the horn of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope have had many shipwrecks over the years. In doing this, Ahab leaves the pod of whales that could be lucrative for him and his crew and also takes them to a dangerous place. When he finally reaches Africa, he meets up with another ship called the " Rachel." The captain pleads with Ahab to help him find his twelve year-old son who is missing at sea. In the Bible, Rachel is the second wife of Jacob/Israel. It is also in reference of the Bible verse "Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more (Jeremiah 31:15 NIV)." Captain Ahab refuses to help the captain of the Rachel find his son. He only wants to find Moby Dick and kill him. When the white whale is finally spotted, Captain Ahab goes out to spear it with his harpoon. The whale ends up killing him, and Ahab's corpse is tied to the whale. The rest of the crew is also killed in the hunt, save for Ishmael. Ishmael clings to a piece of wood and is saved when the Rachel comes by. Captain Ahab's quest for revenge cost him his own life and the life of all the crew except for one man. Ishmael was saved from certain death and is allowed a second chance at life and hope.
The argument
Although this position reads the White Whale as a symbol of an inscrutable higher power, that divinity is inseparable from the theme of revenge, because it is precisely Ahab's vengeful relationship to the god-like creature that drives the novel. Moby Dick took Ahab's leg on a previous voyage, and the captain has transformed a natural misfortune into a personal vendetta against a being he invests with cosmic malice. The whale becomes, in Ahab's mind, the embodiment of everything that has ever wounded or thwarted him — and he pursues it to take vengeance not merely on an animal but on the indifferent or hostile power he believes it represents. The revenge the whale symbolises, on this reading, cuts in more than one direction. Ahab seeks vengeance against the whale-as-god, an act of defiance against a higher power he cannot accept; yet the whale also seems to visit a kind of retribution upon Ahab, destroying him and his ship in the end. The creature thus stands at the centre of a drama of vengeance — the object of Ahab's obsessive revenge and, finally, the instrument of his destruction, as though the higher power it represents repays his blasphemous pursuit. Melville builds the whole tragedy on this dynamic: Ahab's monomaniacal quest for revenge against a being of incomprehensible size and power is what dooms him and his crew. The whale's significance is bound up with the vengeance it both attracts and delivers. Because the White Whale embodies the revenge that consumes Ahab and ultimately destroys him, this argument holds, the whale represents revenge.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Critics note a tension the argument half-concedes: revenge is Ahab's relationship to the whale, not necessarily what the whale symbolises. The creature can embody an indifferent or divine power while revenge remains the human passion projected onto it, so reading the whale as 'representing revenge' risks collapsing the symbol into the obsession it provokes. Other readers hold the whale stands precisely for the inscrutable and the meaningless — its whiteness a blankness — with Ahab's vengeance being his futile refusal to accept that. On that view the revenge belongs to Ahab, and casting the whale as both object and instrument of retribution describes the plot's dynamics rather than a stable symbolic meaning.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Revenge is Ahab's psychological response to his injury; that the whale provokes his vendetta makes it the target of revenge, not necessarily a symbol of revenge. [Rejecting P2] Casting the whale as both object and instrument of retribution describes the plot's dynamics, not a fixed symbolic meaning, and fits equally a reading of the whale as indifferent or unknowable.