Free Will In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

considered the nature of free will. While many insist that their decisions give them control over the courses of their lives, external factors often render one’s tenacity inconsequential. In his Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville explores the tension between fate and man’s thirst for free will. The novel’s central narrative of the revenge-crazed Captain Ahab forcing his crew to hunt the sperm whale that took his leg, ultimately losing his own life and killing all but one of his crew, provides a powerful argument that no matter how hard an individual pursues a goal, he may fail. The world will ultimately decide the fate of each; in fact, those who try the hardest to determine their own lives pit themselves against the world and, in doing so,

That this danger can only be fought with instinct and ignorance reveals the extent to which man is denied consequential free will. Ishmael explains how the whale-line weaves its way around the whale-boat, involving all of the sailors in one dangerous net: “the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction” (229). By making the whale-line the subject of an active voice sentence, Melville assigns it an authority over man: the rope, not man, dictates the action. Moreover, the rope’s serpentine description attributes a malicious intelligence to danger. Whereas danger can rationally scheme, man is left powerless, merely a part of the unthinking “whole boat”. As the snake imagery repeatedly emerges, it engulfs the sentence with an overbearing sense of helplessness: Melville strips the reader of his ability to avoid the snake, thus using imagery of danger to destroy the free will of the reader. Ishmael continues, describing a landsman’s interpretation of the whale-line: “To the timid eye of the landsman, [the oars-men] seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs” (229). Viewing the situation realistically, the landsman clearly understands the danger inherent in the oars-men’s predicament. Yet, Melville mocks the landsman as fearful because he thinks rationally. Melville attempts to make the realistic seem absurd through his jarring juxtaposition of image: lethal snakes are being used as playful decorations. In this attempt to deny the dangerous reality of the situation any realistic appeal, Melville once again rejects rational