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Sorry, this is long and might read a bit like a lit term paper (I promise I'm not just posting my lit term paper), but I think it qualifies as a fan theory. If not, SORRY and I'll post it to r/books or something.
Anyway:
Killing Moby Dick was never Captain Ahab's end goal. Instead, I think that Ahab wanted to die—that hunting Moby Dick was actually an attempt to fulfill a death wish.
When it comes to this book, most people can come to consensus on what it's about: a guy who really, really wants to kill a whale. Where people get held up is trying to figure out what the whale represents for Captain Ahab, as if everything in literature has to have some hidden meaning. Can't a whale just represent a whale sometimes?
Well, no—not in this book it can't. Why not? Because Ahab says so himself. Listen to what he
tells his crew in The Quarter Deck (chap 36):
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
So, er, what DOES he have to say? Basically, he's saying that everything has a deeper meaning—Moby Dick included.
A White Whale (a visible object) is “unreasoning;” it doesn't think for itself.
Some Unknown but Still Reasoning Thing is reasoning; it does things for very specific reasons (this UBSRT seems to be a higher power like God).
The Unknown but Still Reasoning Thing made the whale for some reason, but the whale doesn't know what it is. So, the Whale means something. And whatever that something is, Ahab wants to kill it.
The question now is: what is that something, anyway? Why does Ahab have to kill this whale?
Well, Moby Dick got on Ahab's bad side in two ways:
He bit off his leg.
He stabbed him in the dick.
Both are pretty justifiable reasons to get mad at something, even though people usually just remember the first one. And to answer the question you might be asking yourself: no, Moby Dick doesn't literally stab Ahab in the dick. But Ahab's peg leg—which is made of whale bone and which he only has because of Moby Dick—pierces his groin one night:
“...he had been found one night lying prone upon the ground... his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin.”
You might wonder, “How the heck did a false leg to do that?” And Herman Melville has an answer for you! Here's what the book says: it happened because of “some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable causality.”
Thanks, Herman Melville.
But, if it's one thing we know about unknown, seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable causality in Moby Dick, it's that it always has a symbolic meaning . So, what could getting one's groin pierced mean? Since this book is filled with more phallic imagery than you can shake a phallus at, it's not totally ridiculous to imagine this event as having some sexual undertones.
Ahab laments his “dead bone,” and with a missing leg and a pierced groin, you have to wonder which one he's really talking about. But pierced groin and missing leg, aside, the fact of the matter is that Ahab is getting on in his years.
Even without his injuries, he is in decline—physically and sexually. Like that other masterpiece about an old man hunting a giant fish (As far as Melville is concerned, a whale is a fish), Moby Dick is very much about lost youth. And to answer that nagging question, “What does the whale represent for Captain Ahab?,” Ishmael tell us this much in the titular chapter Moby Dick (chap 41):
“The White Whale swam before him (Ahab) as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.”
Notice the language Melville uses here: malicious agencies eat away at man until he is left with a fraction of his former self. In other words, for Ahab, Moby Dick represents decline (among a bunch of other things). Sure, this decline includes Ahab's pierced groin and his missing leg, but much more damning is the physical and sexual decline brought on by old age.
If there's any doubt that Ahab's biggest concern is getting old, consider what he says in The Symphony (chap 132):
“I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my pillow...biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?”
To be sure, Ahab is sad that he's getting old and that he only ever had sex with his wife once. And this section isn't just quietly mentioned or tucked away in some seemingly pointless chapter like The Town Ho's Story. This is the last chapter before the crew of the Pequod finally encounter Moby Dick. This is Ahab's most honest moment.
Alright, so Ahab is getting old. What does this have to do with a death wish? Well, the thing about getting old is that you can't do anything about it. Even if you say a whale represents old age and you kill it—striking through the pasteboard mask—it doesn't make you any younger. Moby Dick isn't actually old age, he's just a mask for it—a symbol. Although Ahab can never be young again, he can hold onto the last vestiges of his youth as long as he's hunting Moby Dick. Ahab's battle with Moby Dick will be the highest point in his lifetime. If he could, he would chase Moby Dick forever.
But of course, he can't chase Moby Dick forever. His age will catch up with him at some point. This is what Ahab's death wish comes from. Ahab would rather ride the current of his greatest moment and go out with a bang than he would live the rest of his life in decline as an old man.
Listen to what he says to Starbuck right before his final encounter with Moby Dick in The Chase--Third Day (chap 135):
“Some men die at ebb tide, some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now
like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck, I am old.”
See? Ahab knows that he's going to die, but he's in the prime of his life (the “crested comb” is the highest point in a wave). Consider his entire final speech in the same chapter (it's amazing):
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”
He knows that he can't kill Moby Dick, just as he has always known. But he wants to go out in the very act of chasing him—literally tying himself tied to Moby Dick; Ahab's Harpoon snags his leg when it lodges itself in the whale, and he's pulled down under the waves with it. In fact, the whole crew goes down with Captain Ahab and the Pequod. It's a tragic ending, but everyone aboard the Pequod is given what Ahab was after: the opportunity to stave off old age and to die at the “full of the flood.”
Everyone gets that opportunity except, of course, for Ishmael. He is the lone survivor of the Pequod's crew. He floats on a Queequeg's coffin for three days before he gets rescued by another ship, the Rachel.
And all this happens before our narrator decides to tell us to call him Ishmael, at the beginning of the story 135 chapters ago. In all that time, Ishmael has gotten older too. And only now does he begin to realize Captain Ahab's true desire in hunting Moby Dick. Look at what Ishmael says about going to sea in Loomings (chap 1) and then compare it with Captain Ahab's death wish:
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”
Pay close attention to the last two lines there. When Ishmael says that the sea is his substitute for “pistol and ball,” make no mistake: he is talking about killing himself. That is why he mentions Cato taking his own life, a sentence later. And when would someone feel the need to kill himself? When it's a cold November in his soul—the second to last month, just before the year comes to close.
And if that's too much of a stretch for you, he also says that he feels that urge whenever he finds himself “pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral (he) meets.”
Melville's seamen want to kill themselves when they realize that they have begun their descent into old age. By the time the narrator tells us to call him Ishmael—years after the events described in the novel—he has reached that point as well. But Ishmael says that, instead of trying to kill himself with “pistol and ball,” he goes to sea, just as Captain Ahab did.
THE END
