Ahab is Melville’s picture of mortal greatness in the world, a man defined by ambition that only he and God seem to know. This is precisely how Melville introduces Ahab. The first we hear about him is from Peleg, a Nantucket Quaker, former whaling captain himself, and now, along with Bildad, majority owner of the Pequod. He describes his captain of choice to Ishmael, the aspiring whaler, like this: “He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab.”

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is an intense and rather gothic tale of seaman Ishmael’s experience whaling under captain Ahab. It’s a well-known story of obsession, revenge, mania, and ruin–the typically edifying material or a great American novel.

As everyone familiar with American literature already knows, the story centers on Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale, which is indeed a rather theological beast. The whale is not God; God is an unassailable sovereign throughout the novel, the creator of the land and sky and seas and all that stirs and broods in them, including the leviathan of Ahab’s obsession. God not only shapes the course of men’s lives, in Moby Dick, but he haunts their profoundly troubled minds–and, according to Ishmael, all people are so troubled or cracked, not just Ahab.

Ahab is Melville’s picture of mortal greatness in the world, a man defined by ambition that only he and God seem to know. This is precisely how Melville introduces Ahab. The first we hear about him is from Peleg, a Nantucket Quaker, former whaling captain himself, and now, along with Bildad, majority owner of the Pequod. He describes his captain of choice to Ishmael, the aspiring whaler, like this:

He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much, but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales; His lance! aye, the keenest and surest that out of all our isle! Oh! He ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg; he’s Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!

It’s a fantastic description in a book where there is nothing deeper on earth than what lies beneath the waves and no mightier foe to combat than the whales that play in those mysterious deeps.

Ahab is on his own quixotic quest for a kind of greatness that is defined from within him, and it is about much more than wrestling whales or slaying a particularly infamous one in revenge. Like Job Jonah has a complaint against God; like Jonah Ahab dares to defy God; unlike either, however, he refuses to bow before God even when God turns his fury on him in Moby Dick.

The Disease of Ambition

Like God, Ahab is a mysterious being who “doesn’t speak much” but when he does his words are able to upend everything casual and common to men, even the seagoing whaling sort. Neither God nor Ahab is well understood by others yet both haunt and torment the troubled minds of those who encounter them. But Ahab is an ungodly man of demonic dimensions, driven by the very ambition that makes him great and god-like in a most ungodly way.

“Be sure of this, O young ambition,” Melville–or Ishmael–warns us just before we first hear of Ahab: “all mortal greatness is but disease.”

Ahab’s ambition is, for Melville it seems, the defining quality he has in common with the “Ahab of old,” the “crowned king.” Captain Ahab is an embodiment of the “demonic” sort of ambition that, according to James, upsets the world and is a source of everything vile (3:15). God opposes this kind of ambition and those animated by it–the selfishly ambitious who discover that God, who refuses to bend to our will or reward our arrogance, is their mightiest foe.

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