Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Moby-Dick(Herman Melville),.“The Inscrutable Sublime andthe Whiteness of Moby-Dick”by John Becker, independent scholarMoby-Dick—by virtue of its breadth, excess, and explicitly definedthemes and conflicts—has all the trappings of an epic theodicy thatstands in a long literary tradition. Works of theodicy, spanning fromthe Bible to Dante to Milton, are concerned with explaining the waysof God to man and of defending God’s goodness despite the existenceof evil. In relation to this genre, Moby-Dick can be characterized as acarefully orchestrated failure, a failure where the sublime—in all of itsobscurity and inscrutability—is set in the place of divine revelation.As Richard S. Moore asserts in his exhaustive study of sublimity inMoby-Dick, the White Whale is the “quintessential sublime” object,a symbol of all that remains inaccessible to the human mind (136).The stories of Ishmael and Ahab point to the failure of the verytheodicy the book enshrines: By the end of the novel, the cosmicorder does not seem available to human reasoning, whether thatreasoning be obsessively single-minded (Ahab’s reduction of all theworld’s injustices—all that needs explaining—into one symbol made“practically assailable”) or expansive (Ishmael’s multifaceted, negativedescriptions and “scientific” anatomies). Of course, from someonewho is telling and interpreting the story, Ishmael’s sentiments arenot easily separable from the defiant proclamations of Ahab, asJohn Wenke has noted (Wenke 710). The narrative of Moby-Dick is215