In Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick, he explores various themes that involve human’s constant conflict with nature. By using Moby Dick, the elusive white whale, Melville paints Captain Ahab’s journey in trying to defeat the god-like figure. Along the way, multiple people attempt to persuade him and turn Ahab back, to not confront the whale. He, however, is too stubborn and pushes on, eventually leading to his death. Through this, Herman is able to illustrate the unconquerable parts of nature. Like Moby, they cannot be understood and we as humans may never fully understand the earth. However, there are also changes in Ahab himself that should be considered. Through the interaction of the nine gams, we can see that Ahab slowly becomes less and less humane as he tries to find the whale. Furthermore, each of the nine interactions represents a huge part of the story, foretelling Ahab’s own failure.
By attempting to slay Moby, Ahab demonstrates the battle between humans and nature. He is so insistent on completing this goal that he is willing to risk his life, consequently the life of his crew as well. Modern-day, humans have been dominating the world ecosystem, and thus, nature itself. We can kill, rescue, and even experiment on animals, plants, and weather conditions alike with our technology, and yet, we still have things that we fear about nature. The things that people fear the most are things that they can’t control, it’s the things that they don’t know about. To feel content, Captain Ahab wanted to kill Moby, to kill what he knows others cannot. By failing at killing Moby Dick, Ahab demonstrated an issue; the limits of knowledge. It will be near impossible for us humans to know completely about the earth itself. We haven’t even explored the oceans, knowing less than 20% of them well. But there is no real reason we must fully understand the world through and through. By taking on the task of ‘conquering’ the earth, what we are doing is fighting an imaginary enemy. It’s similar to the scene in Moby Dick where Moby tried to avoid conflict, to swim away, but Ahab pushed forward still. The earth itself never challenged the human race, we took on this self-imagined burden. To do this, we have developed numerous instruments in order to further understand the earth, though there are always failures.
One of the most critical moments in the story is definitely told within the nine gams. Put simply, a gam takes place when two boats meet. Captain Ahab uses these meetings to try and find a direction for Moby, but each boat has a story to tell. The first category is where Ahab gets no information on Moby. These boats display the irritability of Captain Ahab, who doesn’t get any information and turns away immediately. In the fifth gam, another boat in which Ahab got no information, he hadn’t even bothered to show up himself, which was immensely unheard of. But there were numerous other boats that did have encounters with Moby Dick, their captains all being left behind in tatters. Gams nine, six, and two all provide info about previous encounters. They foreshadow Ahab’s own fate as they get progressively worse and worse. Gam two had resulted in a few casualties. The captain of Gam six had lost his leg due to Moby Dick, similar to Ahab, and the ninth gam was the worst. The whole crew had just encountered the whale and insisted that Ahab took the warnings seriously. The third gam was the most direct, with a prophet trying to prevent Ahab from continuing further. All of these meetings suggest the horrid fate that Ahab would meet, the closer to the end he got, the worse. However, the most significant gam was the eight. Captain Gardiner had just lost his son at sea and had the same desperation in finding his son as Ahab finding the whale. Even though Gardiner pleaded and pleaded, Ahab turned away mercilessly, and sailed onwards towards his doom.
There is no reward for killing Moby other than his own satisfaction. But even so, Captain Ahab was never a true monster in the beginning. We can see that he did have some vain personality and a conceded manner, but he was always still a human. He even had a soft spot for some of his crew. However, as the different gams came and went, we see that he regresses in his humanity. Slowly he turns into Moby Dick, an irritable whale, pursuing his prey until death. There have been multiple times in which Ahab had been told of the dangers had he continued pursuing Moby Dick. Being persevering is to continue trying within reasonable, possible boundaries. What Ahab had done was put his whole crew in danger, including himself, to capture a whale for a somewhat meaningless reason. Multiple crews were already witnessed having suffered the wrath of Moby, all left tattered and lucky to be alive. Ahab however, thinks he is different. He believed that he would be the sole survivor of Moby’s wrath, to make it out alive, although he is no different from every other sailer. He symbolizes the destructive nature of man. How one obsession could lead not only to self-harm but harm to those around him as well.
Ahab’s encounter was similar to that of a regular person who had tried to kill a ‘god’. Any way of trying to interpret, get level with or even get revenge on a god always came out futile. There is a lot of symbolism in Moby Dick, each reflected by the details, names, and prophecies in the book. The most figurative symbol is Moby itself. The elusive white whale itself was like a god. Some people believe it’s not even real, and some have tried to understand it, none of which have come out successful. However, it also symbolized the idea of self-destruction in man. People can get confused between goals and impossible pursuits, which is what Moby had symbolized to Ahab. Even so, Ahab had fought to the death, also showing the self-created conflict that people have inside their minids. There was nothing saying that Ahab had to kill Moby other than himself, everyone else had told him not to.
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