Response Journal Week 5 - Mayumi

The main secondary source we read, “Loomings,” contained interesting and relevant arguments that served as a lens for my reading of the actual Moby Dick text for this week. Chapter 54 “The Town-Ho’s Story” was a prime example of Ishmael’s dislike of superiority and unresolved conflict. The story was about a mutiny – the inferior sailors posed a problem in which they made a statement about their mistreatment. The sailors are detained, and after a period of time, are about to be hanged when Steelkilt hisses some unknown threats to the captain and are released. Thus the conflict between the superior and inferior goes unresolved. Even after the whole ordeal, Ishmael states that any one of the men onboard would gladly sacrifice whatever they deemed necessary for the needs of the boat. The sailors, even after the mutiny, agree to submit themselves (as inferiors) to the needs of the boat. The rest of the story remains unresolved, ending with Radney’s death (a sailor on whom Steelkilt never got to exact his revenge) and the Steelkilt’s enlistment onboard a French boat.
On page 224 is another example of Ishmael’s appeal to inferiority where the sea is the omnipotent master. Melville writes:

Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.

Even whales are subject to the sea, which in terms of power, remains second to none. Ishmael almost enjoys the leveling of creatures through the subordination of a master. Everyone suffers in some way or another under a master. Although Ishmael doesn’t respect whales to the degree that he does humans, he does show some amount of pity towards them in identifying their same predicament (subject to the whims of the ocean) in this quote.
On a different note, the mystery of the whale appears once again in Chapter 55. After describing the many failed attempts across the globe to draw whales, Ishmael concludes that a whale can never be properly drawn. Even with the guide of a whale skeleton, humans can never put on paper the true form of a whale. They can get close, but they will never succeed. This idea of an essence that can’t be recorded relates back to the Platonic ideas of forms and sense objects. Form is the eternal and unchanging blueprint for the universe. Because humans cannot come into contact with this eternal thus they experience the ideas of form through sense objects – a watered down version of form. If the whale is an eternal form, then his earthly manifestation cannot be mimicked or recorded in any fashion. And if the Moby Dick is the manifestation of eternal (either God or Satan’s will) then this chapter fits perfectly into this intricate puzzle of the book.