The Enigma of Moby Dick

… the Sangskaras entangle him in a world of confusing pictures if he no longer looks for booty but turns at least one eye inwards to find him who seeks. Yes, he falls into the travail of a demoniacal birth, beset with unknown terrors and dangers and menaced by deluding mirages and labyrinthine mazes. The worst of all fates threatens the venturer; the silent, abysmal loneliness in the time which he calls his own.

Moby Dick was published in 1851 when Herman Melville was thirty-two years old. Though it sold few copies in Melville's lifetime—he died in 1891—it came to life, as it were, in the 1920s. Today it has been translated into many languages and has achieved such a popularity that it has even been produced as a film. Now rightly considered one of the great classics of all time, it ranks with Homer's epics, with Dante's Divine Comedy, with Goethe's Faust, and with Shakespeare's great tragedies. Though now finally accepted as a unique work of art, its essential character has remained an enigma. For this reason many interpretations have been attempted. By some it has been read as no more than a great sea-story, yet attentive eyes have seen in it many other things. Lawrance Thompson (1952), for example, titles his book Melville's Quarrel with God, and makes such statements as the following (p. 7): “I noticed that Ishmael's overt meanings reflected a sympathy with the Christian doctrine of obedience and acceptance; but the underlying and insinuated meaning hinted at a deliberate and sly ridicule of concepts sacred to Christian doctrine. The title of his first chapter is ‘Fruit of That Forbidden Tree’.” Such conceptions of Melville's principal purpose prove that this critic recognized the outstanding significance of Herman Melville and, simultaneously, that Ahab's harpoon found its mark.

A very different opinion is voiced by Henry A. Murray (1949) in his Introduction to another of Melville's b