Table Of ContentParadox and Philosophical Anticipation in Melville’sMoby-Dick
A Thesis by
Sara Ott
Bachelor of Arts, Friends University, 1999
Submitted to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
and the faculty of the Graduate School of
Wichita State University
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
May 2006
Copyright 2006 by Sara Ott
All Rights Reserved
Paradox and Philosophical Anticipation in Melville’sMoby-Dick
I have examined the final copy of this Thesis for form and content and
recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Arts with a major in English.
_______________________________________
Dr. Diane Quantic, Committee Chair
We have read this thesis
and recommend its acceptance:
_______________________________________
Dr. Christopher Brooks, Committee Member
_______________________________________
Dr. Wilson Baldridge, Committee Member
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DEDICATION
To Memom and Granddad
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are due to the director of this essay, Dr. Diane Quantic. Without her
editorial assistance and mind-reading skills, this paper would not have the clarity and
precision it now contains. I am grateful to Dr. Christopher Brooks of the English
Department for his assistance on this project in spite of his crushingly busy workload.
Thank you to Dr. Wilson Baldridge for his patient encouragement and insightful thoughts
on Melville’s ocean and novelistic inventions. Finally, to Doug, Cort, and Lyla, if not
for your gift of time, support, and being willing to sit on my lap while I researched and
wrote, I could not have finished this.
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ABSTRACT
Much of the current critical literature on Moby-Dick lacks a unifying focus. This
essay attempts to provide a thread of continuity for Moby-Dick by proving that paradox
and Herman Melville’s anticipation of the early existential movement hold the key to a
full reading of this text. By viewing the text itself, Melville’s personal correspondence,
and the writings of Emerson, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, the paradoxical tension
by which this text must be read comes into clearer focus.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
II. PARADOXES IN MOBY-DICK’S CHARACTERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Ahab. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Ishmael. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Queequeg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Pip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
III. PARADOXES IN SHIPBOARD TASKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
Work and Leisure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
Masculine and Feminine Spaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
IV. PARADOXES AS AVATAR OF EARLY EXISTENTIALISM. . . . . . . . . . .27
Melville’s Response to Emerson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
Melville’s Anticipation of Kierkegaardian Existentialism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
V. LIST OF REFERENCES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
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INTRODUCTION
Billy Budd's narrator asks, “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the
violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors,
but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter the other?” (Billy Budd 334).
Herman Melville'sMoby-Dick displays a “blending” of paradoxes in the major
characters, their shipboard tasks, and Melville’s own life. These paradoxes function at
surface level as contradictions and have even been called “oscillations” by his friend
Evert Duyckinck and the critic Robert Milder (“Dream” 250). The contradictions, as
embodied in the major characters and their tasks, create a tension by their concurrent
presence in one person or task. Melville chose not to resolve the tension inherent in these
paradoxes. As a result, he demonstrates the “blending” of categories such as sane and
insane, god and man, cannibal and Puritan.
The balancing of certain contradictions within an individual character or a task a
character must perform reveals Melville's view that paradox is a crucial element of
human existence. Melville grounded his paradoxes in the characters and the tasks those
particular characters perform. By having his paradoxes rooted in characters who function
as symbols of humanity in general, he clearly demonstrates that his primary concern rests
with people and their tension-fraught relations to themselves and each other. He may
discourse at long length about the whales and the water they inhabit, but never does he
describe the whales in paradoxical terms. The whales in Moby-Dick only feel the tension
from the chase or the harpoon a sailor has imbedded in one of them. Melville implies
that to be human is to live a tension-filled life, to feel the paradox of spirit encased in
flesh. Further, Melville’s characters not only represent a broader humanity, but they
reflect his own struggle with the relationships between God1, humanity, and nature.
Melville could be considered “pre”-existentialist because this work points, as the later
philosophers do, to the paradoxes inherent in humanity’s relationship to God, itself, and
nature. As Soren Kierkegaard in the late 1850s celebrates paradox in his philosophical
writings, so Melville allows paradoxes to remain in the text ofMoby-Dick without a
formal resolution.
A careful view of these tensions and the connections between them shows that
Melville was not “oscillating” in his views. He was straying from the Hegelian tripartite
view of history prevalent in Europe during the early 1800's that claims a system–thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis–can properly resolve apparent paradoxes in a person's
apprehension of truth. The repetition of paradox and the tension this creates in Melville's
work anticipates the existential movement that began in Denmark in 1843 with
Kierkegaard’s publication ofEither/Or, which argued that truth may sometimes be found
in paradoxes, the most notable paradox being human beings with their tensions between
physicality and spirituality/intellectuality.
For Melville, truth itself is paradoxical and individual: “Truth hath no confines,”
the raving Ahab exclaims to Starbuck’s questioning of the hunt for Moby-Dick (Moby-
Dick 164). Truth was not bound to behave in certain logical and rational ways (as Hegel
would have it), and though the text ofMoby-Dick does not explicitly indicate the nature
1In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville admitted, “You perceive I employ a
capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don’t you think there is a
slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?” Nevertheless, he maintained the capital,
which I have preserved in this essay.
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of truth, the prevalence of paradoxes in the text indicates truth may be found in the
paradox. Melville dated the “beginning” of his life from age twenty-five, when he went
to sea and began to experience the paradoxes that “contact with the world” impressed
upon his apprehension of truth (Correspondence 193). In his biography of Melville,
Andrew Delbanco speaks of the impetus Melville’s experiences at sea gave his writing:
“What Melville found at sea was what other writers have found in war: a feeling of
contact with the world that shocked him equally with moments of desire and dread. He
gave up on notions and theories learned from books and became…an engaged participant
in life...” (World 58). His contact with the world and with “life”–meaning different
people he met and the different person he became–helped create his understanding that
life is paradoxically full of objects of desire and dread. As a result, his works reflect the
recognition that man is a paradoxical animal. In Ishmael’s words, Melville speaks to the
reader of these paradoxes:
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch
that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
over his disastrous set of sun; then. . . bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of
Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my
kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! (117)
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Description:and the writings of Emerson, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, the . As Soren
Kierkegaard in the late 1850s celebrates paradox in his philosophical .. This
tension between the speaking and silent narratorial voice frustrated readers of.
