Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick Page A

waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.” And we wait. For an hour. The tension builds, and then in a scene that inverts even as it anticipates the black vortex that will soon consume the Pequod, Ahab stares into the endless watery blue and sees Moby Dick. Note the cinematic nature of how we are there with Ahab as he looks down into the aquamarine void: “[S]uddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.”
    Ahab somehow escapes the White Whale’s first attempt to capture the boat in his jaws, but not the second. Moby Dick rolls onto his back like an attacking shark and seizes the boat in his mouth “so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air.... The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s head.... In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.”
    Fedallah may be sitting there like a diabolical Yoda, but not Ahab. “[T]hen it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.” In our age, we all love whales and wish them nothing but the best, but you’ve got to hand it to this castrated, one-legged, fifty-eight-year-old lapsed Quaker; he doesn’t mess around. Like Melville with his Whale, he has the audacity to take Moby Dick by the jaw. “As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.”
    Now that Ahab is in the water, Moby Dick sticks his head up into the air and starts revolving like a lighthouse beacon so that he can see what’s around him. (As Melville points out in a footnote, this is a common behavior among sperm whales. No matter how fantastic it may seem, everything in these last three chapters could have happened.) What Moby Dick sees, it turns out, is Ahab, who quickly finds himself at the center of a wild maelstrom of whale-induced foam. Luckily, the Pequod isn’t too far away. “Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!” Ahab shouts.
    The ship succeeds in pushing back Moby Dick, and Ahab is hauled into Stubb’s whaleboat, where he lies “all crushed in the bottom . . . like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants.” Instead of a man, Ahab is a piece of topography, a fractured continent echoing hurt and pain. “Far inland, nameless wails came from him,” Ishmael tells us, “as desolate sounds from out ravines.”
    On Day Two of the encounter, Moby Dick bashes Stubb’s and Flask’s whaleboats to bits before diving below the surface. In the swirling wake of the White Whale’s leave-taking, the second and third mates and their crews cling desperately to whatever is close at hand as “the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Thanks to Melville’s letter to Hawthorne, we know how personal this scene is to him. “My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,” Melville wrote. “I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by