Response Journal Week 1- Mayumi

One theme carefully woven into the story of Moby Dick is the image of the ocean’s vastness, in its confusion and obscurity. This aspect of the unknown is a driving force in drawing people, especially Ishmael, to the sea. Ishmael describes life on land as simply going through the motions of living, whereas people’s magnetism to the ocean is a natural process full of life and adventure. The undecipherable ocean imagery appears first in the whaler’s inn where a painting hangs. Melville spends half a page elaborating on a defaced and confusing painting, which, after much scrutiny, he decides depicts a whale impaling itself on a ships mast, in the midst of a vast ocean. Now there is a focus to all the confusion: a goal.
Queequeg, introduced not long after this chapter, is also closely connected to the ocean imagery. Not only is he a whale harpooner and from the South Seas, but he also has a mysterious tattoo on his left arm and a face covered in different colored splotches and altitudes. Ishmael describes the tattoo as a multi-shaded labyrinth, which has changed color due to its constant exposure to the sun. Its meaning and its shape are undecipherable and blend in well with the quilt. Ishmael also compares Queequeg’s multi-colored face to the Andes, a mountain range which shows a wide range in altitudes, climates, and colors.
If these symbols of vast and obscured masses (Queequeg’s tattoo, face, and the painting) are applied to the metaphor of the ocean as knowledge, they could represent the uncertainty of education and the uncertainty of the way information is perceived. Also, when it comes to knowledge, there is not one path that leads to enlightenment; rather, a mess of raw facts that one has to untangle. There isn’t one way to look at Queequeg’s face or tattoos, or one way to look at the painting, just as there isn’t one way to navigate the ocean. The course that one does take is specific to a person or group. As readers of Moby Dick, we are navigating text in different ways, and this is shown through (what I predict to be) our widely varied response journals.