The Questions

The story of Ishmael asks the psychological question Why am I as I am?

• Melancholy, unstable

• The outcast—manic-depressive--over-sensitive to stimuli

• How do his oscillations between hope and fear affect his fate and relations to others?

• Experimental, open to experience

• Pedantic and fiction-making

• Are his exaggerations lies, or necessary to our understanding of ourselves and of the world?

The stories of the Pequod and of Ahab ask the moral question How shall I live?

The Pequod

• Whaling as a symbolic activity--the primal epic of the hunt

• Are we the sources of ferocity in the world?

• The ship as a social and political model—"democracy" and command

• How should officers be responsible to the crew?

• What lessons are there for communities on the land?

• BUT . . . what about exploitation of the wonder-world for profit?

...

Ahab

• Obsession and moral authority

• What is a a person's "proper self"-- that is, how can we avoid becoming merely mechanical, maimed extensions of our injuries?

• A foil to Jonah

• Can a madman be heroic?

The story of the whale asks the ontological question What is real? and the epistemological question What can I know?

• The whale is the obsessive center of the other stories

• Is nature--the whale--the only reality, or does it merely reflect a supernatural reality?

• The oscillations between calm beauty and frightening ferocity call into question the authority of our valuations of the world--Where do we fit in?

• Can we trust our experiences and explanations?

• Can we know anything directly, or must we, like Shakespeare's Polonius, "by indirections find directions out"—perhaps with the moral problem Polonious embodies?

• Is the whale a symbol we have created, just another fact, or the reality on which everything hangs

• Is the world a book, a whale, or a person (Queegqueg)?