Friendship and Companionship in Moby Dick by Herman Melville - Literature review Example

Men, Friendship and Companionship in Moby Dick by Herman Melville He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.1 Moby Dick is the epic tale of one man, Captain Ahab, pitted against a mighty force of nature represented by the title character, the whale. It's not a testament to the brave human spirit, however, but only to human ego and vanity. Moby Dick is of course a powerful tale of sea adventure that provokes imagination with the rich exuberence and creative effusiveness of its style, but Captain Ahab himself is no hero. It is difficult to sympathize with a man who is so engrossed in his own ego and is so taken by its irrational impulses. Moby Dick is the story of the mammoth ego of a relatively much smaller man! Its ending does not invoke tragedy, but only a sense of sheer futility of all ego-ridden endeavor undertaken by men. Ego and friendship are antitheses. We cannot imagine an Adolf Hitler having a bosom friend nor can we think of Ahab relaxing in the company of his near and dear ones. Such people are lone souls, which is not necessarily bad in itself, but often they happen to be lost souls too: they are not only cut off from their fellow human beings, they are also cut off from the vast natural world that sustains our existence. The ego as such, whether big or small, is a statement of our separation with the natural world. It is very useful, in the sense that it forms the basis on which we have built the great modern civilization and conquered nature, at least to a significant extent. Polynesians and other natives do not have much of an individuated ego, they live in exquisite harmony with nature and in harmony with each other; however, they do not have a civilization. Because the ego is needed for that: a crystallized sense of self against the world. Ego thrives on this opposition. But when this ego gets totally caught up in the web of its own conceit and deceit, it is then that the road leads to perdition. We do need to assert ourselves, but not to the extent of positing ourselves at the very center of the world. Friendship and love happen only when we succeed in putting the others before ourselves, to whatever extent possible. But if we become all important to ourselves, then only death can release us from the big lie that we have become prisoners to. Friendship, love, and this feeling of oneness between ourselves and the greater whole - this is the truth. Ego is merely an illusion, albeit a very necessary one. We need to learn to lose our ego sometimes. At other times, we need to learn to use our ego, but still not be used and consumed by its megalomaniacal tendencies. Friendship is a beautiful experience, one of the most precious that is possible in human life. All that it needs is for us to put the weight of our egos aside and try to relate to the people and the world we see around ourselves in a more meaningful and deeper way - which is exactly the kind of thing that is impossible for colossal egos like Captain Ahab. Through all its rich narrative and storytelling, the one thing that Moby Dick conveys to us in the end is the meaninglessness and pointlessness of ego-obsessesed pursuits of man. But this is not to say that all ego is bad. For example, the central character of another nearly contemporary nineteenth-century epic, which too incidentally is set in the ocean and involves a giant sea-creature - Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues is as gigantic an ego as is Captain Ahab. But there is a crucial distinction. Captain Nemo's ego is bent upon relentless construction, whereas Captain Ahab's ego is bent upon mindless destruction. Though both of them meet their deaths equally ingloriously at the sea, Nemo stands as a fallen hero, an inspiration to genarations to come, whereas Ahab, in spite of all his monumental drive and crushingly powerful speeches, is nothing more than a confused mind that has seemingly lost its bearings, and is an inspiration only to existentialists (though Gregory Peck or Patrick Stewart can be of inspiration to a much wider audience!). If there is one thing that redeems human existence in this transient world, it is creativity. Ego is good only in so far as it manages to foster creativity. However, by far the biggest force of creativity in existence is love, manifested in a myriad ways of which friendship is one of most prominent. Friendship can be such a transformational influence in our lives. And in the life of the poet-philosopher-narrator of Moby Dick, the person of "Call me Ishmael" fame, this indeed happens to be the case. Though the dominant theme of Moby Dick is that of self-centered defiance of Captain Ahab, it is contrasted with the sub-theme of friendship and camaraderie that is interwoven across the main narrative. The living conditions in a ship or a submarine are quite different from normal conditions on land. People are forced to live and work together in close quarters, and this fact naturally makes way for a heightened sense of bonding in between men aboard. Not only do the crew members of a ship live in tight proximity to each other, they have only one another to look up for help in case of emergency, which does not occur so infrequently in the context of an ocean-faring vessel. Still, the presence of the elements of friendship, camaraderie and male bonding do not appear too overtly in Moby Dick, but only in a subdued tone. The single prominent theme of friendship in Moby Dick is that between Ishmael and the Polynesian harpooner with a queer name, Queequeg! The most striking fact about Ishmael and Queequeg's friendship is that they strike a deep chord in a very short time, in a day or two. Queequeg is an aboriginal from the Pacific, mostly living outside the cultural ethos of the Western world, and Ishmael is a staunch Presbyterian who admittedly tries to befriend Queequeg with an intention to convert him. But it is perhaps the profound untainted innocence of the native that wins over Ishmael's heart. Ishmael at first meets with his new bunkmate under a very prejudiced frame of mind. This aborigine is a "heathen" and, who knows, he could be a cannibal too! But soon, Ishmael finds some kind of bond developing between them. The next day, in the midst of New Bedford arctic winter, sitting in their room, next to a simmering fire, watching the cannibal browsing the pages of the Bible (presumably), Ishmael suddenly becomes "sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it." This is an extremely significant observation indicative of an instant transformation of heart. These few sentences define the nature of friendship in as profound a manner as any other in the annals of literature. First, Ishmael says he became sensible of strange feelings. What are these feelings These are in fact not any particular feelings such as related to joy or sorrow, but are just "feelings." Ishmael is inundated with "feeling" - an uncategoried expansive emotion. And then he feels a melting inside him. This is a very characteristic response accompanying the awakening of the heart. In us human beings, heart is the center of feeling and mind is the center of thoughts - now we all know that. But what we may not so well know is that civilization tends to suppress the natural expression of heart in human beings. Civilization is the process of putting a premium on mind at the expense of heart. Our education, upbringing, culture all are part of making us more and more mind-oriented. Because only then would we be able to benefit society. Civilization needs aggressive ambitious Ahab-type people, who are driven to achieve their goals whatever be the cost, even walking on a peg-leg! And the basic prerequisite for this is that people have to be somehow rendered intensely unhappy inside, because if people become happy and contented inside - they would not be madly driven to realize some far off goals. The strategy for achieving this is simple. Get people out of touch with their own hearts. Heart has a natural proclivity to happiness, just as mind has a natural proclivity to unhappines. Mind is a mechnasim meant to solve problems, and as such it has a natural tendency to see only problems and problems everywhere. Even if problems do not exist, mind actually goes on actively creating problems. Naturally, it happens to be the lot of human mind to be miserable most of the time. Moreover, mind has an in-born tendency to see only the things that that are not present, so that it can do something to bring about these things. For example, Captain Ahab does not have a leg, the whale took it off - now instead of thinking positively and being glad that he was not eaten alive, his life spared with just one leg gone, all his attention gets focused only on the lost leg. The leg becomes everything to him, and his everything is taken away from him! Now he will go to any length to exact revenge for this injustice done to him. This is how the mind functions. And the heart functions in exactly the opposite manner. It can see all the oceanic immensity that is present around us, it can rejoice in it, it can be grateful for it. Friendship is the thing that can magically bring us in touch with our own hearts. The friend is only a trigger for us to open up to the whole world. Suddenly the intrinsic opposition between us and the world is gone. The friend becomes a gate to a grand vastness that had hitherto lain undiscovered. This is what explains the observation that has been so eloquently put by Melville: "No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world." It is as if through the means of the friend the whole world itself has become friendly. It would indeed be perceived as a strange sensation at first by any person who has been looking at the world from an inimical angle all his life, like indeed the majority of us, and not only Ishmael, are wont to do. Suddenly we feel in rapport with the world, reconciled with it. We are no more estranged with it, as is the grim Captain Ahab. It is as if the the whole world is given back to us. What more euphoria can there be! This is what Ishmael must have experienced at that moment when something mysterious transpired between him and Queequeg, heart to heart. It is simply a phenomenon of Ishamael's heart opening up to the wonder of this world, the wonder of people, the wonder of life itself, at some vague unconscious level. it is love alone, as manifested in the marriage of Ishmael and Queequeg, that can offer an alternative to the impending apocalypse of destructive, and ultimately self-destructive, fury.2 This feeling can be so powerful that it can engender a whole new type of creativity, based on love and not on conflict. If our civilization has to become viable we have to reshape it on this new kind of creativity based on a friendly attitude to existence, and not the kind of creativity that issues from the madness of the ego. This kind of flowering of friendliness need not only happen between people, it can happen between anything and oneself. You are looking at a beautiful flower, and suddenly something happens, a door is opened to another dimension of beauty. No wonder that the cultural differences between Ishmael and Queequeg, and other facts such as Queequeg bearing a hideously marred appearance, did not seem to have mattered in the least. Something happened at a level untouched by cultural conditioning and civilization, something primordial. This is friendship. The very next morning, while still lying in the bed with closed eyes, Ishmael makes a tremendous observation: "Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part." This is the primordial darkness of the heart that mind is so afraid of facing, and where all differences between oneself and the other dissolve. And in Moby Dick when all is lost in the end, Pequod is gone as is its captain, and everyone dies, Ishmael is rescued by this friendship that buoys him up coming in the form of Queequeg's coffin. This is a very poignant symbolism used by Melville. Perhaps what he meant to say was that ultimately it is in friendship that hope for life lies. Interestingly however, this last scene can lend itself to quite a contrasting interpretation too: Yet utterly alone as he is at the end of the book, floating on the Pacific Ocean, he manages, buoyed up on a coffin that magically serves as his life-buoy, to give us the impression that life itself can be honestly confronted only in the loneliness of each human heart.3 End Notes 1. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, 1851, http://www.americanliterature.com/md/MD10.HTML (accessed May 14, 2006) 2. Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville, University of North Carolina Press, 1986 3. Kazin, Alfred. Ishmael and Ahab: An Introduction to Moby Dick, http://www.multimedialibrary.com/Articles/kazin/alfredmelville.asp (accessed May 14, 2006) Read More