Moby Dick is a thought-experiment. Melville imagines what it would be like if a whale were as intelligent as a human. Instead of running away it would turn and fight. Moby Dick, the white whale, is scarred with harpoons still tangled on his back; these are wounds or trophies from previous encounters with humans, but he always turned and wrecked the harpooners’ boats. As literary critics have generally recognized, he is white to indicate he is nearly human. But no one in the novel explicitly recognizes wherein his humanness lies — that he recognizes the tactic humans rely on to kill whales. The limits of humans’ perceptiveness of animals come out in their seeing Moby Dick only as supernatural or diabolical (and in the case of the critics, as symbolic). Moby Dick is not necessarily malevolent, but he is intelligent enough to see that running away will kill him, and that his only chance is to turn and counter-attack.Moby-Dick is famous for proving true the maxim that great art can always be interpreted in different ways. It's a cliche of entertainment to have a professor ask his class, "What does the white whale represent?"
It's my favorite novel and one that I've read many times. I think Melville's point is clear: The novel is about man's capacity for reading into the world around him. Moby-Dick, in the life of the book, doesn't represent anything but himself. As a literary device, the whale is a sideways MacGuffin, the object that the characters observe and draw personal meaning from.
In other words, Moby-Dick is a Rorshach test. The theme is encapsulated in the scenes in which all of the major characters examine the gold coin that Ahab has offered to the first sailor to sight the whale. Each one examines the same object and takes a vastly different meaning from it.
The theme of attaching meaning to the external is repeated throughout the book. Ishmael creates a panic when he believes Queequeg has died in bed when it turns out he is simply a deep sleeper. The ominous coffin that Queequeg has constructed--he believes his illness means death but he survives--saves Ishmael's life at the end.
Ishmael himself sets out to see whenever he goes "hazy about the eyes"--life on the ocean resets his attitude toward life on land. In a scene that won't be mimicked in contemporary literature, Ishmael enters town so morose that every black-colored item fixes his attention until finally, he enters a church for relief. To his (comic) horror, it is an African-American church and every face that turns toward him is as black as what he's trying to escape.
Melville includes several chapters outside of the book's narrative that are usually excised from the abridged editions. They are puzzling upon first read--all about the different types of whales, and other objective and scientific essays. But they have a purpose and that is to emphasize the trap into which Collins has fallen. We can know what the largest whale is. We can know where they migrate. We can know how other cultures regard them. But their interior life we can never know.
Collins surmises that Moby-Dick is "as intelligent as a human," that he is perceptive enough to understand the methods by which he's hunted. He says that the characters see the whale as "supernatural or diabolic" and sneers that critics see him as symbolic, but Collins sees him as a person. A fiction, sure, but a fiction of a whale with a human mind.
But Melville isn't pointing at some interior quality of Moby-Dick--in fact, he shows us through Ahab that believing that one knows the whale's character is the path of madness and destruction. Melville is pointing at a mirror and everyone thinks he's pointing at their own reflection.
Collins tells us that literary critics agree that Moby-Dick's coloring is an indication of his humanity, but Melville devotes a whole chapter to "The Whiteness of the Whale." In it, Ishmael ponders white as a color of purity and majesty, then turns to consider it as an element of terror, as a hint of something demonic that's unseen. This mystical fear, Melville takes pains to tell us, is how Ismael regards whiteness, but he does not stop there.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind."[T]he wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him," Melville writes.
Most importantly, he concludes:
"And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"
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