Humanity And Inhumanity In Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Herman Melville can be considered one of the most important writers of the American Romance. His masterpiece, Moby Dick, tells the reader the story of Ishmael, an isolated sailor whose only escape is the sea, his one and only consolation. Ishmael joins the Pequod, a whaling ship captained by Ahab, an obscure and sick old sea wolf obsessed with the haunting of Moby Dick, a white sperm whale which ripped his leg out, leaving in his mind a deep revenge desire. In this paper I illustrate the description of the captain Ahab’s inhumanity and cruelty, as well as Ishmael’s desire of being in contact with the sea, seen as a way of escaping from the world he lives in.

Captain Ahab’s inhumanity is described along the story, letting the reader discover Ahab’s reasons of his cruelty. Ahab is described like this:

“His mind was not on profit, and not even on the parting with his young wife, whom he had married three voyages back; it was on Moby Dick. On his last voyage he had crossed the path of the great white whale, then the terror of the seas, and lost a leg in the encounter. In the intensity of his suffering on the long passage home he had been a little out of his mind, and ever since he had given way to a desperate and savage moodiness”. (Myers 15) But Ahab is not only described psychologically. Melville gives us an accurate description based on the physical appearance:

“There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut