#and the way that he (like Ahab) self-imposes Fate to make sense of his traumatic experience with Moby Dick

[starbuck]

okay so. the whale is The Narrative.

[woozapooza]

Hey wait a minute! I just realized something!

Ishmael in chapter 1, “Loomings”: “I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage [...] cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.” 

Ahab in chapter 132, “The Symphony”: “By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.”

I’ve thought a ton about fate in Moby Dick, and it’s something I reaaaally want to say more about in the future, but for now I just have to draw attention to this little parallel that just occurred to me. Both of our two main guys proclaim that their lives are not their own, that their actions were engineered by Fate(s). Oddly, I think that for both of them, this rejection of their own agency is actually a way of taking back a smidgen of control, or rather of the illusion of control. For Ishmael, it’s preferable to believe that he was destined, for some unknown but undoubtedly important purpose, to experience the most traumatic thing he’s presumably ever experienced than to believe that both his involvement with the Pequod and his survival came down to simple, meaningless luck. For Ahab, it’s preferable to believe that "the path to [his] fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon [his] soul is grooved to run” (as he says—or as Ishmael imagines he says, if you prefer to think about it that way—in chapter 37, “Sunset”) than to acknowledge that his reckless, pointless quest for vengeance is a choice. And in fact, that choice is, in turn, a way of regaining a sense of control in the aftermath of his experience of awful vulnerability in the face of the whale. Both of these guys come face to face with the "vague, nameless horror” (chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”) the whale seems to them to represent and seek refuge in the idea that their actions in this horrifying, chaotic world aren’t their own. In reality, this is nonsense. They, like everyone, choose their own actions. And the whale doesn’t really symbolize anything, but that’s a story for another post.

The major difference between the two quotes above is that Ishmael is looking back and imposing coherence on events that didn’t really mean anything—he’s narrativizing, to use a handy literary word I learned in the class I had to take my junior year of college as a requirement for majoring in English, in which I had to read some literature I really did not enjoy such as Ulysses and some theory/criticism that went totally over my head but “narrativity” is one of the few concepts we discussed that made sense to me. Ahab, on the other hand, is looking ahead, justifying the path he’s currently on—a path from which Starbuck, catching him at an opportune moment, very nearly swayed him. Honestly, I think the very fact that a combination of his own regrets and Starbuck’s influence came so close to getting Ahab to see sense is what accounts for Ahab’s sudden, dramatic reversion to his “iron rails” philosophy. At that point, there’s a huge element of sunk cost fallacy going on. It’s not just the three or so years he’s spent obsessing over Mr. Dick weighing on him, it’s the forty years he’s spent in the whaling industry. Forty miserable years, and he’s worse off now than when he started. Ahab feels powerless—I mean, he’s a captain, but that’s power over other people, not power over his own life—and chasing the whale allows him to fight that feeling. But if he were to acknowledge that he chooses to chase the whale, then he’d have to acknowledge that it’s just a mechanism for coping with his lack of power. So in order not to feel powerless, he has to pretend that he is powerless. Wow, this guy is messed up. AU where Ahab has a support system and maybe a therapist. Anyway, Ishmael’s case is different because he really did not have as much control over what happened to him and his crewmates as Ahab did. He was just a random guy on the crew. So Ahab invokes Fate to dodge accountability for the few things in his life he can control, whereas Ishmael invokes the Fates to convince himself that there was some reason underlying a series of events that would otherwise be both tragic and meaningless. But it is, fundamentally, the same strategy for coping with existence.

Oh hey, there’s another interesting thing: Ishmael conceives of himself as a minor but ultimately essential player in a cohesive story, whereas Ahab doesn’t suggest that there’s any grand purpose to the path he’s on (at least not as far as I remember, but I could be forgetting something). That’s sort of counterintuitive, because Ishmael is so content to fade into the background, whereas Ahab is generally—there’s really no nice way of saying this, but I promise I’m saying it with a heavy dose of empathy—obsessed with his own issues. But then, I guess Ishmael perceives the Fates acting on him from the outside, moving him around like a chess piece by presenting “springs and motives” to him, whereas Ahab sees his own soul as having been shaped by fate. The latter is definitely more self-centered than the former. Again, that sounds harsh, but I swear I’m not saying Ahab thinks too highly of himself or whatever. On the contrary, I think Ishmael seems to have a much healthier sense of self-esteem than Ahab does. Sad face.

Ishmael and Ahab are so very different, which is what makes it so interesting to note the things they have in common. But then, once you’ve noted a commonality, the really interesting part is looking a little deeper and noticing where the commonality breaks down...and then the really REALLY interesting part is noticing where it doesn’t break down even upon close inspection.

Side note, I think it’s very on-brand that Ishmael uses a theatrical metaphor for Fate and Ahab uses a nautical one.