The Unwitting Vehicle for Evil in Moby Dick :: Moby Dick Essays

The Unwitting Vehicle for satanic in Moby Dick   My opinion more or less symbolism in the phonograph record Moby Dick is a patchwork of the Evil Captain theory and the No subjectness theory. In this theory chance and stage setting cause an unlucky (as opposed to ill-fated) captain to become the unwitting fomite for evil. It is not his fault, he is driven to it by simple bad luck, and so evil is created out of nothingness, and then disappears from whence it came. The giant star represents nothing, Starbuck represents nothing, Pip only if serves to represent the madness that would have overtaken Ahab had he not invented an evil giant star to blame his leg on, and most importantly Ishmael represents God, or the truth, or almostthing I havent thought up a name for yet.   One thing that surprised me about this book was how contradictory the wording was. Sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters were quite a simply put to the ax and cut short as if Herman changed his in tellectual upon further contemplation. At first I thought that Herman had A.D.D. but currently I figured that he was playing the old trick on us. That is, he was intentionally being non-descript in order for everyone to interpret the book in a different way (its such a parkland trick now that I look back, but it really had me for a while). In the beggining the quote reads, Whales in the sea, Gods will obey, as if Moby Dick was beyond a force of nature, a tool of consummate evil, but by the end the book the quote reads normal, Whales in the sea, Gods will obey (notice the genitive case apostrophe missing in the first one?thank you for misquoting). An example of this type of contridiction of ideas occurs in the midst of pages 197 and the last page   Aside from the more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any mans soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its i ntensity completely overpower all the quiet and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in comprehensible form. it was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I apprehend to explain myself here and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.