The Meaning of Whiteness

The Madness Of The Whale
Or: The “Meaning” Of Whiteness In Moby Dick
December 23, 2007
Revised From: December 10, 2005

In the “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter of Moby Dick, Melville combines so many different possible interpretations of whiteness as a symbol that thinking of “whiteness” as a symbol becomes absurd. Instead of the color of the whale holding some sort of deep meaning or significance for the reader, perhaps it is better to view its importance to the characters of the story. It is a deflection away from the personal feelings and status of the individual. Just as this is true for Ahab, who seems to become obsessed with the whale for some inexplicable reason that almost certainly is either sexual or racial in nature, this also may be true for Ishmael. Ishmael’s search for meaning in Moby Dick may actually be to deflect away from his own inadequacies and his own private madness that questions the very reasons that Ishmael is on the Pequod to begin with.

Ishmael cyclically restricts the freedom of others and himself. In the first paragraph, Ishmael discusses his reasons for going to sea. What is included is not as important as what is not, however. What lacks from his explanation are references to family, friends, or anything social. He refers to methodically knocking people’s hats off, spontaneously following funerals, and other antisocial activities. While he says that he joins the Pequod to be part of a fixed social hierarchy, he never explains why being part of a fixed social hierarchy is at all a good thing. Instead, once again, what he does not refer to is as important as what he does. The physical act of being on a boat for several months at a time is the uttermost form of restricting his physical, social, and personal freedom. Those on the boat might be the epitome of civilization, but they are also the epitome of confinement. Opposed to this, Moby Dick is the epitome of freedom. Ishmael is incapable of grasping why it is that he joins along, at the beginning of the “Moby Dick” chapter, with the others. It could be because Moby Dick is everything that Ishmael failed to accomplish—Moby Dick is free, and shows no signs of being disconcerted with his own natural surroundings. Instead, Moby Dick seeks to destroy the humans that try to kill him as one might expect any animal to. When viewed in conjunction with his actions of joining the boat at all, after coming from a state of total freedom, Ishmael’s decision to help kill Moby Dick does not seem at all perplexing. Just as he destroyed his own freedom, he seeks to destroy the freedom of others, in this case, Moby Dick. A facet of the rage Ishmael and the crew expresses toward Moby Dick could be one of jealousy, of the satisfaction with freedom they do not have and never will acquire. The men of the Pequod destroy freedoms they desire but have left behind for social tolerance, a freedom which only is regained with the destruction of society, or the Pequod, as a whole, as at the end of the novel.

The fundamental tenet of American society, that of freedom, is something which Ishmael, Ahab, and the whole Pequod is unable to comprehend or accept. Moby Dick, being merely an albino whale, is a blank template upon which they thrust unending hatred, in the case of Ahab, or in Ishmael’s case, a multitude of meaning when really there is none implicit. The real dilemmas are those that are not spoken of in the novel, because they are too focused on trying to discover the meaning of the whale. They externalize their own loneliness, and the prisons they create for themselves, so that they do not have to confront them. If Ishmael were capable of giving meaning to his life on the boat, he never would have allowed Ahab to lure the crew into an obsessive quest to destroy the whale. Instead, he too tries to give the whale meaning, allowing Ahab’s complete deflection of his own inner demons to consume the crew as a whole and, ultimately, to destroy the Pequod and all on it, save Ishmael himself.