Throughout Moby-Dick, images of magnitude are repeatedly used as a motif to reflect the scope and weightiness of the novel itself. The two most obvious symbols of magnitude presented in the novel are that of the sea and that of the leviathan, both of which are emphasized as not only grand in scale, but also in what they represent.
The sea, referred to both as the “watery world” and the “wonder world,” is presented as being a world in itself with its own sense of the sublime. It is not only expansive in its physicality, but also in its temporality, with the closing images of the sea rolling on as it “rolled five thousand years ago” expressing this timelessness. The power that comes with such magnitude is also made clear in this image, in which the sea’s great scope allows it to completely swallow the Pequod and its crew. Such magnitude also corresponds to the scope of knowledge which the sea is said to contain, with Ishmael asserting how “in landlessness alone resides highest truth.” Similarly, in the symbol of the whale, physical magnitude is shown to correspond to a magnitude of meaning, with Ishmael’s determination to witness the whale’s “island bulk” motivated by his belief that in such scope lies powerful knowledge.
The limits of art to fully and accurately represent its subject forms a motif in the novel that highlights the limits of the novel itself. This motif plays out most extensively in Ishmael’s exploration of man’s repeated attempt to depict the whale in art—and, for that matter, his repeated failure. This idea is first introduced in Chapter 3, before Ishmael embarks on the Pequod. He comes across the “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture” of a whale hanging in the Spouter Inn:
Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. [...] a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.
In his description, Ishmael emphasizes his difficulty in deciphering this picture, a difficulty that reflects the whale’s essential evasiveness but also the shortfalls of art in giving faithful representations. The calling of the attempt to paint the whale as an attempt “to delineate chaos bewitched” spells out this impossibility. Furthermore, this motif comes up again in Chapters 55-57, in which Ishmael accounts for all the various representations of the whale, “in paint; in teeth; in wood; in sheet-iron; in mountains; in stars,” which he views as all united in being “pictorial delusions.” Indeed, when introducing his cataloguing of the various depictions of the whale in art, Ishmael explicitly states his intention: “It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.”
By emphasizing the inability of the artist to give a fully accurate representation, Ishmael implicates the inevitable failure of his own attempt to depict the whale in art, that is the novel. As he states in Chapter 55:
You must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.
Ishmael thus acknowledges that his attempt to reproduce the whale in all its greatness and grandeur and terror is doomed to fall short, with language ultimately bound by limits. Ishmael’s writing of Moby-Dick is yet another imperfect attempt “to delineate chaos.” There is, however, something important about the attempt itself, and Ishmael is determined to try to depict the whale regardless of his awareness of its impossibility—a determination that shows the importance of the artistic process, by which one may at least come closer to understanding.
The color white is used as a motif in Moby-Dick to emphasize humans' fear of the unknown. The terror of whiteness is most clear in its association with Moby Dick, the White Whale, whose whiteness Ishmael describes as being the thing “that above all things appalled me.” Indeed, in an attempt to explain the terror of this whiteness, Ishmael spends a whole chapter cataloging the various other places where whiteness appears in nature and the different significances it has acquired: whiteness as “beauty” in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; whiteness as “innocence” in brides; whiteness as typifying the “majesty of Justice” in the ermine of the Judge; whiteness as divine power in the esteem of the “white forked flame” by Persian fire worshippers. While Ishmael here emphasizes the range of meanings that white can have, by showing just how much significance has been attributed to the color all over world, the motif works to demonstrate how it is a colour consistently associated with power.
As Ishmael explains, for all these associations, “there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more panic to the soul than that redness that affrights in blood,” and indeed it is this elusiveness that proves key, with white coming to most of all symbolize mystery and the unknown. Ishmael reflects:
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
Here, Ishmael’s use of paradox demonstrates the difficulty in pinning down whiteness, which evades definition. That it is both the “absence of color” and the “concrete of all colors” shows this impossibility. The paradox in the description of whiteness as a “dumb blankness, full of meaning” perfectly encapsulates the symbolism of the White Whale in the novel, which represents both the intrigue of life’s central mysteries as well as the horror of life’s potential meaninglessness.
The association of white with lacking is also emphasized as a key part of what makes it so terrifying: white is “indefiniteness,” “heatless,” “blankness,” “colorlessness.” Such absence is shown to scare humans because of its implications of meaninglessness, with Ishmael’s references to “annihilation” and “atheism” showing how it is the fear of nothingness that truly terrifies man. The literary associations of such “blankness” are also significant, with whiteness’s evasion of definition highlighting the frustration frequently expressed by Ishmael as a writer, who repeatedly tells us that his words can never do justice to representing Moby Dick. He is a “nameless horror” whose most frightening aspect has to do with his blankness and unreadability.
The limits of art to fully and accurately represent its subject forms a motif in the novel that highlights the limits of the novel itself. This motif plays out most extensively in Ishmael’s exploration of man’s repeated attempt to depict the whale in art—and, for that matter, his repeated failure. This idea is first introduced in Chapter 3, before Ishmael embarks on the Pequod. He comes across the “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture” of a whale hanging in the Spouter Inn:
Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. [...] a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.
In his description, Ishmael emphasizes his difficulty in deciphering this picture, a difficulty that reflects the whale’s essential evasiveness but also the shortfalls of art in giving faithful representations. The calling of the attempt to paint the whale as an attempt “to delineate chaos bewitched” spells out this impossibility. Furthermore, this motif comes up again in Chapters 55-57, in which Ishmael accounts for all the various representations of the whale, “in paint; in teeth; in wood; in sheet-iron; in mountains; in stars,” which he views as all united in being “pictorial delusions.” Indeed, when introducing his cataloguing of the various depictions of the whale in art, Ishmael explicitly states his intention: “It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.”
By emphasizing the inability of the artist to give a fully accurate representation, Ishmael implicates the inevitable failure of his own attempt to depict the whale in art, that is the novel. As he states in Chapter 55:
You must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.
Ishmael thus acknowledges that his attempt to reproduce the whale in all its greatness and grandeur and terror is doomed to fall short, with language ultimately bound by limits. Ishmael’s writing of Moby-Dick is yet another imperfect attempt “to delineate chaos.” There is, however, something important about the attempt itself, and Ishmael is determined to try to depict the whale regardless of his awareness of its impossibility—a determination that shows the importance of the artistic process, by which one may at least come closer to understanding.
Moby-Dick is full of signs that characters are unable to read, forming a motif that represents the limits of language and knowledge. One example of this comes with Ishmael’s description of the physiognomy of a whale, which is itself a symbol of mystery in the novel. In an attempt to describe the face of a whale, Ishmael expresses his inability to fully comprehend it. Addressing the reader, he says:
If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
Here, Ishmael’s choice of words, which refers to his “unlettered” self and talks of “reading” the whale, refers to the limits of language, or at least that of his own. While Ishmael otherwise proves himself a lettered man, the whale, which is made up by a different system of signs, is something he simply cannot comprehend. Just before this quote appears, Ishmael compares his attempt to read the whale to the French philologist Champollion, who “deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics.” This reference to hieroglyphics, a word Ishmael also uses multiple times to describe the marks one can find on a whale’s back, is significant for the exoticism it would have represented to his contemporary western audience. Through referring to hieroglyphics, a language that is readable to others but not himself, Ishmael shows how his inability to read the whale does not necessarily mean its mystery is universally unreadable. Instead, Ishmael emphasizes how it is outside of his own limited knowledge.
The incomprehensibility represented by Queequeg in the novel can be seen to make a similar point. Queequeg, who like the whale is a largely voiceless character, is presented as a “riddle” throughout the novel. Perhaps one of the most significant symbols of Queequeg’s unreadability is the mark with which he signs the shipping papers for the Pequod. Asked to “sign thy name or make thy mark,” Queequeg makes a copy onto the paper of the “queer round figure” tattooed on his arm, a symbol that exists beyond the limits of Ishmael’s knowledge of language. As explored later in the novel, Queequeg’s tattoos are the work of a prophet, and even he cannot read them. They are, in this way, symbolic of life’s central incomprehensibility.
Images that relate to circularity are repeatedly used in Moby-Dick, forming a motif that hints at man’s own entrapment in the circularity of life. Throughout the novel, readers see the circle come up literally in objects such the compass and the doubloon, which when probed further prove to have figurative implications. In Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” a chapter that documents how each crew member of the Pequod interprets the doubloon in a different way in accordance with their own subjectivity, Ahab alludes to the symbolic significance of the circle. Looking at the scene depicted on the doubloon, Ahab describes how the coin reflects himself back at him:
The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self.
Ahab’s comparison of the round gold with the magician’s glass links circles and reflections in an infinite cycle that highlights the way people may get caught up in their own circularity. For each man aboard the Pequod, the doubloon only reflects back their own self. This idea of entrapment in circles comes up again multiple times in the novel. In the “Great Armada” scene, it is the whale’s formation in circles that proves to trap them. Even more poignantly at the novel’s very climax, the sinking of the Pequod, it is a “vortex” made up of “concentric circles” that “carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.” The vortex is symbolic of nature’s great power, by which men are rendered powerless. In light of this, circles come to acquire a dark symbolism in Moby-Dick.
Throughout the novel, power and control is frequently described in relation to the idea of magnetism in a motif that blurs science and the supernatural while reinforcing the role of fate. After a storm that reverses the needles of the ship’s compasses, Ishmael reflects on the power of magnetism. He says:
The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven.
Here, Ishmael’s reflections on the compass show how its power is at once derived from humans and the gods. As a man-made tool, the compass symbolizes man’s scientific endeavors and the successes of human engineering. However, Ishmael’s assertion that the force it relies upon (magnetic energy) is “essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven” injects it also with a divine power that goes beyond man’s capabilities.
But Melville does not restrict his references to the power of magnetic energy to the compass and navigation. Indeed, magnetism is also used in a more figurative sense to describe other things that have an attractive power. When describing the universal pull of the sea for man, for example, Ishmael wonders whether it is “the magnetic virtue of the needles of compasses of all those ships [that] attract them thither." Magnetism is also used to describe the irrational lure to hunt Moby Dick: “What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s a magnet!” And, indeed, the motif continues to describe the power of language itself, with Ahab’s great rhetorical power in the episode where he announces the Pequod’s quest to the crew also described in terms of magnetism.
In all of these examples, the idea of magnetism is used to portray the overwhelming and often dangerous sense of allure that objects and people can hold over man, an idea that reinforces the novel’s exploration of the ultimate power of fate. In all these cases, the power of magnetism is described as one that limits personal agency, with the men drawn to the sea, to the whale, and to Ahab by a force beyond their control.
