Why Read Moby-Dick

will get the coin. The crowd goes wild. “ ‘ Huzza! huzza!’ cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.”
    The harpooneers, it turns out, have all, at one time or another, seen this notorious whale. “ Death and devils!” Ahab exults. “[M]en, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
    At that moment, Starbuck puts two and two together. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?”
    Ahab had apparently hoped to leave out this particular detail. “Who told thee that?” he spits out. But after a brief pause he decides that instead of denying the truth, he’ll make the truth work for him. “Aye, Starbuck,” he acknowledges, “aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.” And then he does what only the best politician can do; he sheds a tear. “‘Aye, aye,’ he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose . . . ; ‘Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.’ ”
    This is the pivotal moment. But Ahab needn’t have worried. “ ‘Aye, aye!’ shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: ‘A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!’”
    â€œGod bless ye,” Ahab says with a “half sob and half shout,” before ordering the steward to serve the men some grog. He then turns to the first mate. “But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”
    Starbuck responds by asking what Ahab’s vengeance will get “in our Nantucket market.” It’s then, to borrow from the movie This Is Spinal Tap, that Ahab dials his charisma to eleven. “But come closer, Starbuck,” he says, “thou requirest a little lower layer.” It’s not about the money, he explains; this is personal. Thumping his chest, he cries out, “[M]y vengeance will fetch a great premium here !”
    Starbuck is quite rightly appalled. “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,” he sputters, “seems blasphemous.” This prompts Ahab to reveal the logic, such as it is, behind his campaign against the White Whale. According to Ahab, Moby Dick is not just a sperm whale; he is the tool of an unseen and decidedly evil power. “All visible objects . . . ,” Ahab insists, “are but as pasteboard masks.” By killing Moby Dick, he will punch through the mask and get at the root cause of all his unhappiness and pain. He then compares the world to a jail cell. “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Unlocking the secrets of the universe by killing a whale doesn’t make much sense, but what good is rationality to a man possessed by such a terrifying and all-devouring rage? “He tasks me; he heaps me,” Ahab cries. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
    He then directs Starbuck’s attention to the rest of the crew, all of whom are “one and all with Ahab.” And besides, he continues, what’s so terrible about pursuing a white whale; isn’t whale killing what it’s all about? “ ’ Tis but to help strike a fin,” he insists, “no wondrous feat for Starbuck.”
    Ahab finally appeals to Starbuck’s not inconsiderable vanity as a whaleman. “From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back?” When the first mate does not immediately respond, Ahab knows he has him. “Starbuck now is