¹ Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (New York: Library of America, 1991), 17Google Scholar.

² See, for instance, Samet, Elizabeth D., Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 64Google Scholar.

³ James, C. L. R., Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1978), 15Google Scholar.

⁴ Rogin, Michael Paul, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 139–40Google Scholar.

⁵ Alvis, John, “Moby-Dick and Melville's Quarrel with America,” Interpretation 23, no. 2 (1993): 223–47Google Scholar.

⁶ Dalsgaard, Inger Hunnerup, “‘The Leyden Jar’ and ‘The Iron Way’ Conjoined: Moby-Dick, the Classical and Modern Schism of Science and Technology,” in Melville “Among the Nations”: Proceedings of an International Conference, Volos, Greece, July 2–6, 1997, ed. Marovitz, Sanford E. and Christodoulou, A. C. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 252Google Scholar; Gunn, Giles, “Enamored Against Thee By Strange Minds: Recovering the Relations between Religion and the Enlightenment in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature,” in Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought, ed. Shea, William M. and Huff, Peter A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76Google Scholar; Bickley, R. Bruce Jr., “‘Civilized Barbarity’: Melville and the Dark Paradoxes of Waging Modern War,” in War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare, ed. Deats, Sara Munson et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 131Google Scholar.

⁷ See, for instance: Cahir, Linda Costanzo, Solitude and Society in the Works of Herman Melville and Edith Wharton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 25Google Scholar; May, Rollo, The Cry for Myth (New York: Delta, 1992), 279Google Scholar; Murray, Henry A., “In Nomine Diaboli,” in Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick,” ed. Selby, Nick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 80Google Scholar.

⁸ Melville, Moby-Dick, 108.

⁹ Melville, as James McIntosh puts it, works at “humanizing” Ahab throughout the book (“The Mariner's Multiple Quest,” in New Essays on “Moby-Dick,” ed. Brodhead, Richard H. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 40Google Scholar).

¹⁰ Melville, Moby-Dick, 109. In both the title of and introduction to her book, Norling, Lisa (Captain Ahab Had a Wife [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000], 1)Google Scholar picks up on the fact that little attention is given to this kind of pedestrian or domestic detail in Ahab's life, despite multiple mentions in the novel.

¹¹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 21. The entire speech appears in Webster, Daniel, Speeches and Forensic Arguments (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), 433–35Google Scholar. William Ellery Sedgwick notes that when Melville wrote Moby-Dick, “the American whale fishery expressed the best in the American character. It also exemplified the peculiarities of our national life” (Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945], 90)Google Scholar.

¹² Melville, Moby-Dick, 141. Melville is correct that Benjamin Franklin's grandmother Mary Morrill (or Morrel) was one of the founding female residents of Ahab's native Nantucket. See Whittemore, Henry, Genealogical Guide to the Early Settlers of America: With a Brief History of Those of the First Generation (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1967), 196Google Scholar.

¹³ Melville, Moby-Dick, 108, 146.

¹⁴ Kim Leilani Evans has argued that if Ahab has power over the crew, “it is because they share, at some level, his motivations.” See Evans, , Whale! (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 107Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Melville, Moby-Dick, 29.

¹⁶ Ibid., 17, 102.

¹⁷ This is an argument that Oliver Goldsmith does make in his essay “On the Use of Hyperbole.” See The Works of Oliver Goldsmith (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900), 6:83–86Google Scholar.

¹⁸ The original remark appears in Forster, John, The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871), 2:191Google Scholar. The emphases in the quotation are in the original.

¹⁹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 181, 185.

²⁰ F. O. Matthiessen describes this as Ahab's “self-enclosed” character. See American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 459Google Scholar.

²¹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 151, 56, 60, 65, and 99.

²² The only exception to this rule is the black cabin boy Pip, a Connecticut native who seems, as a result of an accident that left him in the throes of what all on the ship deem “insanity,” to grasp the interconnectedness of all things. Jason Frank explores Pip at length in an as yet unpublished essay titled “Pathologies of Freedom in Melville's America.” I discuss Pip briefly at the end of this paper.

²³ Melville, Moby-Dick, 78, 498–499.

²⁴ For example, McWilliams, Wilson Carey (The Idea of Fraternity in America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], 342)Google Scholar suggests that “the circumstances of his birth would have made it difficult for him to form emotional bonds with the world,” and that Ahab's Quaker religion taught him “to be a man of ‘stillness and seclusion,’” thus contributing to his solitary ways. James (Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, 79) contends that Ahab's isolation stems from his rank, itself “inseparable from the function of authority in the modern world.” And August J. Nigro argues that Ahab's “dismemberment also leads to Ahab's external separation from community” (The Diagonal Line: Separation and Reparation in American Literature [Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984], 78)Google Scholar.

²⁵ The great example along these lines is Captain Boomer, the captain of an English whaling ship called the Samuel Enderby who lost his arm to Moby Dick. As Robert Zoellner has observed, Boomer's reaction to his injury is “opposite” to Ahab's. Boomer responds to his injury by drawing closer to his men, enhancing the already convivial and affectionate character of relationships on his ship. See The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of “Moby-Dick” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 116Google Scholar.

²⁶ Melville, Moby-Dick, 151; 22.

²⁷ The original volume is Rhodes, James Allen, A Cruise in a Whale Boat, by a Party of Fugitives: or Reminiscences and Adventures During a Year in the Pacific Ocean, and the Interior of South America (New York: New York Publishing Company, 1848)Google Scholar. See Kier, Kathleen E., A Melville Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Loos-Z (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1990), 1132Google Scholar.

²⁸ Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The American Scholar,” in Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Johnson, Charles (New York: Signet, 2003), 244Google Scholar.

²⁹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 527.

³⁰ See Blau, Richard Manley, The Body Impolitic: A Reading of Four Novels by Herman Melville (Amsterdam: Rodopoi N.V., 1979), 79Google Scholar; Michael, John, Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 100Google Scholar; and Rogin, Subversive Genealogies, 138. Adamson, Joseph (Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye: A Psychoanalytic Reading [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997], 93)Google Scholar writes that Ahab “responds with shame and rage to any situation in which he finds himself incapacitated” or “dependent on others.”

³¹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 365, 146. Elsewhere, he repeats this message by saying that if you think about man from the point of view of the “moons of Saturn”—a very non-Earth-bound position—the idea of “man alone” is a vision of “a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.” But from the same viewpoint, men as a collective “seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates” (521).

³² Ibid., 89. Queequeg repeats this feat later in the book when he rescues Tashtego when the latter falls overboard into the massive head of a sperm whale (390–91).

³³ Aside from Queequeg's un-Americanized behavior and mannerisms, Melville also draws attention to the fact that Queequeg continues to worship an idol named Yojo according to his ancestral customs. Queequeg takes the bearings for his thought from a set of traditions that seem completely unfamiliar to all the Americans in the novel. See Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon, 70.

³⁴ Melville, Moby-Dick, 537.

³⁵ See Otter, Samuel, Melville's Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 164Google Scholar.

³⁶ Melville, Moby-Dick, 365.

³⁷ Ibid., 602–6.

³⁸ See, most notably, Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 315Google Scholar. See also Burbick, Joan, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173Google Scholar; James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, 79; and Maguire, Ian, “‘Who Ain't a Slave?’: Moby-Dick and the Ideology of Free Labor,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 2 (2003): 300Google Scholar.

³⁹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 605.

⁴⁰ There is no doubt that Melville considers Starbuck an isolato, and not only because Ishmael says that everyone on the ship could fit that appellation. Elsewhere, Ishmael singles Starbuck out as an isolato, remarking on “the wild watery loneliness of his life” (Moby-Dick, 144). And Starbuck himself at one point says that he regards himself “alone here upon an open sea” (572), a comment which I discuss in more detail below.

⁴¹ R. E. Watters writes that “in Melville's opinion, prolonged isolation either chills the heart or corrupts the mind—or both” (“Melville's ‘Isolatoes,’” PMLA 60, no. 4 [1945]: 1140Google Scholar).

⁴² See Watters, R. E., “Melville's ‘Sociality,’” American Literature 17, no. 1 (1945): 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Melville, Moby-Dick, 604, 484, 27.

⁴⁴ See Stephens, Michelle Ann, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 252CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ See McGuire, “‘Who Ain't a Slave?,’” 289.

⁴⁶ Melville, Moby-Dick, 28.

⁴⁷ Crane, Greg, “Ralph Ellison's Constitutional Faith,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Posnock, Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 114Google Scholar. “Responsibility rests upon recognition,” says the Invisible Man, “and recognition is a form of agreement” (Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man [New York: Vintage International, 1995], 14Google Scholar). Ellison drew many of his themes from Melville's work; notably, the epigraph to that book comes from Melville's Benito Cereno.

⁴⁸ de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Bradley, Phillips (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 2:99Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ The coin described is an eight escudo gold piece, which were actually minted by Ecuador from 1838 to 1841 (and in a smaller version between 1841 and 1843), during the very early years of that state's existence as a republic. See Royster, Paul, “Melville's Economy of Language,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 317Google Scholar. See also Krause, Chester L., Standard Catalog of World Coins: Spain, Portugal, and the New World (Iola, WI: Krause, 2002)Google Scholar, in which the coin is listed as KM 23.1.

⁵⁰ See Sten, Christopher, Sounding the Whale: “Moby-Dick” as Epic Novel (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 64Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Robert Milder sees in the book “a series of parallel soliloquies” (Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 73Google Scholar).

⁵² The only interaction there is amounts to a kind of violent frenzy, about which I say more later.

⁵³ Melville, Moby-Dick, 565.

⁵⁴ Sitney, P. Adams, “Ahab's Name: A Reading of ‘The Symphony,’” in Herman Melville's “Moby-Dick,” ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 144Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:98.

⁵⁶ It is telling that Queequeg, who I describe throughout this essay as providing an alternative vision to that of Ahab and the other Americans, tells Ishmael that he sees Christianity as a corrupting force (Melville, Moby-Dick, 83).

⁵⁷ Ibid., 186–87.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 338. See also Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon, 223.

⁵⁹ For instance, Stubb suspects that the devil has something to do with Ahab's quest for the white whale. See Melville, Moby-Dick, 371. Notably, Stubb happens to walk by Starbuck during the scene I am about to describe: he seems to reinforce the idea that Starbuck is unable even to consider working in concert with others on the ship. For his part, Stubb is oblivious to Starbuck's agonies.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 572.

⁶¹ This exchange echoes a moment much earlier in the text, during which Ahab lambastes Stubb; in line with my argument elsewhere, Stubb decides to tell no one about Ahab's aggression and does nothing.

⁶² Ibid., 197.

⁶³ Bryant, John, “Moby-Dick as Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Levine, Robert S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Melville, Moby-Dick, 197.

⁶⁵ See Leverenz, David, “Selection from Manhood and the American Renaissance,” in Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick,” ed. Selby, , 131Google Scholar. Interestingly, psychologists today consider the “humiliate or be humiliated” dynamic so well embodied by Ahab to be a central feature of the sadomasochistic personality type. See, for instance, Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures, ed. Kleinplatz, Peggy J. and Moser, Charles (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park, 2006), 287Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Mitchell, David T. and Snyder, Sharon L., Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 138Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Gabriele Schwab says that Ahab's “god of fire is a god of destruction who steers his destiny” and thus is in that respect Ahab's great ideal (Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994], 56Google Scholar).

⁶⁸ Melville, Moby-Dick, 564.

⁶⁹ William Hamilton explores Ahab's “defiance of humanity” in Melville and the Gods (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 58Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Zuckert, Catherine H., Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990), 111–12Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 477. Notably, in this passage Ishmael notes that only American whalers are equipped with a try-works located so prominently that it is easy for men to stare into its fire (474).

⁷² See Markels, Julian, Melville and the Politics of Identity: From “King Lear” to “Moby-Dick” (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 68Google Scholar. See also Gilligan, James, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 23Google Scholar; and Kaplan, Harold, Democratic Humanism and American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005), 170Google Scholar.

⁷³ Melville, Moby-Dick, 102.

⁷⁴ For instance, only right after they kill a whale do Stubb and Flask have a conversation about the direction in which the ship is heading. See Melville, Moby-Dick, 369–374.

⁷⁵ Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination, 108.

⁷⁶ Brodhead, Richard H., The School of Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 37Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Melville, Moby-Dick, 316–17.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 360.

⁷⁹ Brodhead, Richard H., “Trying All Things: An Introduction to Moby-Dick,” in New Essays on “Moby-Dick, or the Whale,” ed. Brodhead, Richard H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ See West, Michael, Transcendental Wordplay: America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 329Google Scholar. Similarly, James Fentress Gardner writes that “the whole ship's company could be swept along by Ahab, regarding his mad quest as their own” because “all are partly moved by the spiritual principle … that Ahab centrally represents” (Melville's Vision of America: A New Interpretation of “Moby Dick” [New York: Myrin Institute, 1977], 39Google Scholar). Zuckert, too, argues that Ahab is able to obtain the crew's sympathies because “they, too, wish savagely and naturally to strike back”—although in her telling, this is less a particularly American trait than a natural human one; see Natural Right and the American Imagination, 102.

⁸¹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 215, 516, 284.

⁸² See the discussion of the rule of “fast-fish and loose-fish” in ibid., 446–49.

⁸³ Ibid., 223. D. H. Lawrence calls Moby Dick “the deepest blood-being of the white race” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1951), 173Google Scholar. Toni Morrison makes a similar argument in Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 15–16Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ See Karcher, Carolyn L., “A Jonah's Warning to America in Moby-Dick,” in Herman Melville's “Moby-Dick,” ed. Bloom, , 67–92Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ See Powell, Timothy B., Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 153–76Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Melville, Moby-Dick, 636.

⁸⁷ McWilliams, Wilson Carey (The Idea of Fraternity in America, 341)Google Scholar observes that “whatever else his death is, it is not lonely.”

⁸⁸ William Ellery Sedgwick says that in this way, Ahab's “whole inward truth is reflected in the manner of his death” (Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, 117).

⁸⁹ Melville, Moby-Dick, 446.

⁹⁰ Thomas Woodson writes that to dismiss Ahab as “a madman, a Satan or a Byronic egotist is too simple” (“Ahab's Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus,” in Critical Essays on Herman Melville's “Moby-Dick,” ed. Higgins, Brian and Parker, Hershel (New York: Hall, 1992), 440Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:99.

⁹² Melville, Moby-Dick, 593.

⁹³ Bryant, John, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 225Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ Melville, Moby-Dick, 147, 638.