4. Symbols of the Sublime: The Sea and the White Whale

Conclusion

Herman Melville‟s Moby-Dick is a book that produces a feeling of profound fascination within the reader, kindled by the very first sentence of the narrative, which then grows as the motives, storyline and symbolism of the novel unravel (Drewermann 2004, p.13). The continued legacy of the renowned novel has resulted in countless interpretations of the meaning of the White Whale, analyses of Ahab‟s monomania and the nature of Ishmael as a character, in addition to various other elements in the novel of lesser recognition. Based on my personal reading of Moby-Dick, I have examined the text in a manner that would underline what to me constitutes the essence of the novel, which is the notion of the sublime. To pin down an abstract notion such as the sublime to a single definition and interpretation is a challenge that is only successfully approached by refuting the very idea of it and acknowledging the diversity of the sublime. The same holds true for the uniqueness of Moby-Dick as a literary text. Due to this likeness I have chosen to combine the novel, Moby-Dick, with the literary and philosophical subject matter that does justice to the profundity of the novel, the sublime.
In the theoretical section of the thesis I have presented an account of the sublime from both a literary and philosophical point of view. Burke‟s and Kant‟s respective philosophies on the sublime are almost exact counterparts. For the same reason, they can be applied to explain naturalistic and psychological elements within the novel that portray the sublime. Burke focuses on the terror of the sublime in nature, whilst Kant considers the sublime as part of human nature, being moral. In addition to Burke‟s and Kant‟s sublime I have provided an overview of the sublime as it is generally portrayed in Romantic works of literature and traces thereof that are found in Moby-Dick, whilst also paying attention to Coleridge‟s and Schopenhauer‟s theories on the sublime. The bulwark of my thesis begins with a character-analytic approach in understanding Ishmael and Ahab‟s perception of the
Ishmael, who is treated as the more significant character in my thesis, is the voice of the world of Moby-Dick. On the surface, Ishmael is a very malleable and dynamic narrator whose narration style is at times a give-and-take between him and the reader. This renders Ishmael unreliable and „disorderly‟, but these are the required characteristics of the narrator since the macro-textual level of the novel is dynamic itself, as is the sublime which Ishmael attempts to illustrate. Therefore, I consider Ishmael to be not only an internal character of the novel but also the human manifestation of the novel. Deep down, Ishmael is in fact an honest narrator despite appearing unreliable. He is an empiricist in the Burkean sense, describing the realm of phenomena in the way he experiences it. However, when Ishmael encounters notions of sublimity, he is urged to enter the realm of noumena, applying imagination to express his admiration for the sublime. The core of Ishmael as an individual is defined by his quest for self- realisation and transcendence.