Response Journal Week 3-Gabi

This section we read for today was particularly significant for many reasons. Mayumi, Caleb, and Gabriel all touched on the way Melville uses perspective, shifting from an authority on whales to Captain Ahab, to Starbuck. We get see how the different characters feel about Captain Ahab’s mission to find and kill Moby Dick. The way these character’s respond shape our own feelings about this turn of events. If we combine this with the way that Ahab is portrayed in chapter 36, “The Quarter Deck,” we get a very complex set of perspectives.
The first thing that came to mind when I was reading “The Quarter-Deck”, was The Bacchae. Captain Ahab is driven by an almost Dionysian force. Just like Dionysus has his converted followers, Ahab, almost magically (through a combination of bribery with gold, and a lot of enthusiasm) gets most of the other men in his boat behind his cause. Ishmael almost seems to feel like he is possessed, “...stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine.” (152) Caleb mentioned the musical-like feel of chapter 40, and bringing to mind the dances and revels of The Bacchae. This mission makes no logical sense (except for maybe to Ahab). One would assume that the other men on the ship would object very strongly to risking their lives for a pursuit that would even bring about any financial compensation. Early in the reading (126), Melville wrote about the “community” of the ship. The men, since they are payed according to their “common luck” in whaling, must all work together. They are brought together by this common goal to hunt whales so they can all make a profit. Ahab has changed the nature of this community by changing their common purpose (if one can even call it common).
Caleb also mentioned the passage in “The Mast-Head” in which Ishmael (or Melville) compares the ocean and the cadence of the waves to the soul, “... [the sailor] loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and natur.” (136) While this might seem irrelevant and even campy, if the ocean is like a soul, then what is the whale? Moby-Dick can represent a part of Ahab's soul that he is obsessed with vanquishing.