Across the Great Sea: Moby-Dick and the Problem of Suffering

Having read Moby-Dick three times, I confess that I have read Moby-Dick three more times than your average twenty-something. Unusual though I may be, I am (mostly) unapologetic about my tastes for one simple reason: If Moby-Dick was written for anyone, it was written for the twenty-something.

Don’t believe me? Open the pages of Melville’s monstrosity yourself and you will discover what I mean. You will find, I hope, what I find every time I return to Melville’s literary masterpiece—a sense of homecoming, of recognizing this unsettling, unfathomable world as your own. Something about Ishmael’s whaling adventure makes me feel at once comfortable and uncomfortable, as if the damp, drizzly November in my soul, like Ishmael’s, heaves a sigh of satisfaction in my quiet return to the ship. Perhaps it is my substitute for walking into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off.

I’m not the only one. Moby-Dick is a beloved work of literature, but not because it is easy to comprehend. Perhaps it is loved because it offers us difficult questions without easy answers—because it speaks directly to the heart of the young seeker who has just begun to see the world for what it really is.

We have Captain Ahab, the peg-legged madman whose leg was bitten off by a white whale named Moby Dick. We have Ahab’s vow to hunt the White Whale “round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames” before he gives him up. We have Starbuck, the first mate whose moral uprightness and commitment to duty almost saves Ahab. We have Ishmael, our curious narrator who writes 752 pages (my copy) in his futile attempt to understand the power of God and nature. And then we have the White Whale himself—the representation of the unfathomable mystery that all these characters are chasing. What is Moby Dick? Is he God’s divine justice or his inscrutable mercy? Is he personified divinity or blind chance? Is he cruel or kind? What on earth does the White Whale mean?

Literary critics have been trying to answer this question for years. Not everyone agrees on the answer, but we do agree on the question.

Ahab chases Moby Dick for the sake of his lost leg. The peg leg is not a romanticized symbol, but a real picture of human suffering. “Is it not hard,” Ahab asks, “that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?” The missing leg causes Ahab physical, mental, and emotional pain; he goes insane not just from the injury, but from the unfairness of it. In his initial encounter with Moby Dick, Ahab was doing his duty as any ordinary whaler would, hunting whales to earn a living for his wife and child. But most whalers manage to keep both of their legs, and for some reason, Ahab must endure the rest of his life with just one. Why? Out of all the whalers in the world, why Ahab?

Despite Ahab’s demoniac madness, legions of readers have found something sympathetic in him–and no wonder. At their heart, Ahab’s struggle—and Moby-Dick as a whole—are both about the problem of suffering.

The problem of suffering is a philosophical and theological quandary that asks how suffering can exist if God is both all-good and all-powerful. If God is truly good, and if He is capable of preventing the suffering of innocents, why doesn’t He? Efforts to resolve the problem of suffering are called theodicy, from the Greek words theos, meaning “God,” and dikē, meaning “justice.”

This is the point at which, I humbly submit, Moby-Dick aims its emotional arrows directly at the heart of the young adult. This is not at all to say that the older generation becomes numb to the problem of suffering. I am simply pointing out that there is an age somewhere between childhood (during which we remain blissfully ignorant of mortality and suffering and death), and middle age (during which we have, perhaps, come to accept the sober inevitability of human suffering), where we first come to realize that we are not immortal. We are not immune to the human condition. We, too, will suffer. We, too, may lose a leg, a wife, a child. We, too, will be subject to punishments that we didn’t deserve—and we, too, will watch our enemies receive rewards that they didn’t earn. The Brazilian author Clarice Lispector succinctly expressed this sudden, awful apprehension in the final words of her novel The Hour of the Star: “My God, I just remembered that we die. But—but me too?!”

This realization hits sometime between childhood and full-fledged adulthood, and the force of it is terrible. If you are young, you will know what I mean. If you are no longer young, perhaps you will remember the first time you bore the staggering weight of human suffering and recognized it for what it was.

So you are young, and your eyes have been opened to the knowledge of good and evil, and of course you are terrified, and you are right to be terrified because the world is terrifying. The White Whale looms like a specter before you and you do not know what it really is.

If we consider Moby-Dick as a work of theodicy, we see the character of the White Whale in a new light. Moby Dick represents the divine hand of God, His sovereignty, His inevitable and fearsome power. We fear Moby Dick, and yet we are drawn to him. We wonder why the White Whale singles out Ahab, out of all men, for extraordinary suffering and judgment. Does Ahab deserve his pain? Do we deserve our pain? Or is God’s judgment arbitrary?

Herman Melville was no stranger to these questions. Our author was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, and as a boy he sat in church and listened to sermons that preached the basic tenets of Calvinism: that God has predestined some to eternal bliss and some to eternal damnation, and that humans must not question the divine wisdom of this choice. There is nothing you can do, Calvinism says, to change your fate. You are a vessel prepared either for destruction or for glory.

As he grew older, Melville left the church. Like Ishmael, he took to the sea. He worked as a cabin boy; he was shipwrecked; he lived as a captive among cannibals; he participated in a mutiny; he hunted whales. He chased the mystery of God around the world, tormented all the while by the vision of God’s severe justice that his childhood had instilled in him.

On August 5, 1850—just before writing the bulk of Moby-Dick—a 32-year-old Melville met his literary idol, Nathanael Hawthorne. For months, Melville kept up an intimate literary correspondence with Hawthorne as he wrote Moby-Dick. In these letters, Melville bared open his tortured soul: his doubts about God, his uncertainty about divine justice, his musings on the grand mysteries of life and nature. These letters do not reveal an author with a clear mission statement, but a man who has not yet made up his mind what he thinks about God.

Hawthorne once wrote of Melville that “he can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” This should not surprise us, given the nature of this novel that he wrote in a feverish frenzy. Is the White Whale the God of Calvinism, who spares the elect and smites the damned? Even if he is, should he be loved and revered, or hated and hunted? Or is suffering a matter of arbitrary chance? Is despair the natural response to the human condition?

In 1852, soon after the publication of Moby-Dick, Melville wrote a letter to Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia. In a sweetly earnest moment, Melville remarks how strange it is that although we find it easy to criticize people, we grow embarrassed when we praise them. He laments this fact, saying that “though we know what we ought to be; and what it would be very sweet and beautiful to be; yet we can’t be it. That is most sad, too. Life is a long Dardenelles, my dear madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; and so we float on and on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last—but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate and vacant it may look, lies all Persia and the delicious lands roundabout Damascus.”

That is the astonishing thing about Herman Melville. Despite all his theological torment, and despite all his uncertainty about the nature of God, still—somehow—he managed to cling to the hope that somewhere across the perilous sea, there is a land that will give us the Answer, that will show us what we are looking for.

And so Melville, a young person himself, wrestles with God in the pages of his magnum opus. But in the end, what does Melville have to say about God? Is He friend or foe? Is He cruel judgment or tender mercy? What is Melville’s answer to the problem of suffering?

As a character, Moby Dick certainly appears cruel. He attacks ships with an apparently malicious vigor; he seems to go out of his way to cause mayhem; it appears plausible that the White Whale hunts whalers as much as whalers hunt him.

And yet, at the end of the novel, Ahab makes three attempts to kill Moby Dick. He lowers his hunting boats three days in a row, and for the first two days, he returns to the ship, unsuccessful in his futile mission. When he lowers his ships for the last day, his first mate Starbuck looks out to see that the White Whale is not swimming toward the ship. He is not preparing to meet Ahab in battle. Instead, he is swimming out to sea—away from the Pequod. Starbuck calls after Ahab in one last, desperate attempt to prevent his captain from sailing out to his doom:

“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”

Moby Dick seeks thee not, Starbuck says. You are the one who is madly seeking him. No matter how it may appear, maybe—just maybe—God is not the author of your suffering. You, perhaps, have brought some of it upon yourself. Some of it is the direct consequence of sin. And some of it you must wait to understand, because the mystery of God’s mercy is hidden behind a veil of blinding white.

What is Melville’s answer? No matter what the literary critics may argue, I maintain that the novel offers us no answer. Moby Dick is cruel and he is kind. He is senseless violence and he is tender mercy. He is a dumb beast and he is the hand of God. Ahab, Ishmael, and even Starbuck cannot understand the White Whale any more than they can understand the lightning strike or the ocean storm. Melville can’t tell us who God is because he doesn’t know. He only hopes—hopes that Moby Dick is not seeking him, hopes that there is a beautiful land across the great sea, behind the white veil, and that if he only sails far enough, he will find it one day. This hope is all that the young Melville has to offer his readers, young and old. But perhaps it is enough.

At the end of the novel, when Moby Dick’s maelstrom finally sucks the broken Pequod down into the deep, we are told that the “great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” When nearly every man on the ship dies, we are left with silence from every one of the characters we have come to know and love—except Ishmael, the wreck’s only survivor.

The epilogue begins with an allusion to the Book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Like the servant in the Book of Job, Ishmael breaks the tragic news to us, and he, too, has no explanation. The epilogue puts us in the position of Job. We are the sufferers; we are the ones who must bear with loss. What, Melville asks, is our answer? Now that we have sailed for years with these characters, now that we have watched them die through no fault of their own, what will we now say about God?

After all, Herman Melville has spent 209,117 words turning the question over and over and over and, in the end, admits that he has no answer but hope. On the last page, he asks you for your answer.

What do you have to say?

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