Irony or Ironies and Implication\'s of Queequeg\'s Coffin in Herman Melville\'s Novel Moby Dick

Queequeg's Coffin

There are a thousands different ways for a man to lose himself and his soul - and a number of ways for him to be saved. Herman Melville presents us over the course of his work with a dozen different ways in which men find and lose and sometimes find themselves again. For Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, the way to life and to perhaps even hope is by death, or at least by an emblem of death, for it is by a coffin that he is - to steal a Dickensian phrase - recalled to life.

The first line of the novel is, of course, one of the best-known opening lines in English literature - but it is also a clue to the character of the narrator as well as a clue to the intent of Melville in writing this book. We are meant, as soon as we are asked in such an intimate way, to call this narrator by his more famous namesake. The journey that this Ishmael takes is not exactly like that of his Biblical counterpart, but it is in many ways the same for both men can only be saved when they recognize that they cannot save themselves.

Ishmael literally means "God Hears." Applying this reference of Ishmael to the novel, we can see that when the sailor Ishmael cried for help from the maddening quest of Ahab, God did hear him and provided him with an escape in the end through Queequeg's coffin. The crew of the Pequod found death in following their captain to the end, however, Ishmael was heard by God, and saved. Ishmael's survival produced, essentially, Ishmael the narrator who, in speculation, is alone left to tell the tale of the Pequod's adventure. Thus, the birth of Ishmael the narrator, an 'orphan', to tell us the tale of Captain Ahab and the wretched Pequod (http://westerncanon.com/cgibin/lecture/HermanMelvillehall/cas/15.html).

Melville is preoccupied in his work with the idea that each person (or eachman at least, for women are strikingly absent from Melville's tales) is attracted to the seeds of his own destruction. We can perhaps see this more clearly about Ishmael if we compare him to another Melville protagonist - although in this case one who is embraces his fate rather than calling out in protest against it.

Bartleby the Scrivener, in Melville's 1856 short story of that name, seems to be as distant a character as is possible from Ishmael, but the two are in fact very much the time. In the short story as in the novel, we see the author condemning much of what he saw around him in society. This is not simply a story about a character named Bartleby but rather an allegory about the common worker in the middle of the 19th century, a worker who found himself being defined more and more in terms of the labor that he could provide for others and less in terms of what he (or she) could do for himself.

Bartleby is a man who has been displaced by industrialization, a man whose soul means nothing at all and who is only of value to society so long as he can work. Bartleby himself seemingly comes to realize this, and rebels against his reduction to a cog in the money-making schemes of others and so rebels in the only way that he cane think of - by trying to convert the office back into a home. He is the kind of man who has not been - like Ishmael - able to escape to the sea.

Yet, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor's hall all by himself. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous -- a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage! (http://www.bartleby.com/129/)

Young Goodman Brown is very similar to Bartleby in that each of them, having realized some truth about their world, finds themselves unable to come to terms with the vast difference between the way that they once believed the world should be and the way that it actually is. Each of them begins to fall apart and to be scorned (and pitied) by those around them because having once seen the pretense and lies that their societies are built upon they no longer possess the ability to conform their own behaviors to social standards because they have come to understand how empty these standards are.

Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting (http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid.264/).

Although the specifics of the milieux that the two authors are writing about are quite different, these two worlds are the same in their suppression of individuality, and these two protagonists are the same in their inability to conform with sufficient completeness. But Ishmael is saved while Bartleby is not.

Melville allows Ishmael to be saved - and he is saved because he is a willing participate in his own rebirth, in his own salvation. Melville seems to be arguing - and this is of course nothing more or less than good Christian orthodoxy - that those who admit hat their fate is in the hands of God are actually taking control of that fate and determining that they will in fact be saved.

Ishmael is a believer not only in God but in the possibility of personal salvation; while Bartleby may believe in the former he most certainly does not believe in the latter.