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Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Coffin as Life-Buoy:
Queequeg’s coffin becoming Ishmael’s life-buoy is an example of situational irony that highlights the novel’s exploration of immortality and fate. Ahab curses the carpenter as a “heathenish old scamp” for undertaking the task of transforming the coffin. However, though initially abhorred, the philosophical pondering that the coffin-lifebuoy goes on to evoke in Ahab highlights the novel’s deeper and metatextual reflections on the idea of immortality. Ahab reflects:
Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that.
Ahab’s provocation that the coffin might after all be an “immortality-preserver” proves to be extremely apt. The coffin not only goes on to save Ishmael after the sinking of the Pequod, it also goes on to preserve the memory of Ahab and the rest of the crew, with Ishmael’s survival necessary for the creation of this very novel. In light of this, Ahab’s words acquire a metatextual resonance; that we can read the recording of his speech in this chapter is thanks to the preserving qualities that the coffin is being given at that very moment. Just as the coffin is an object that facilitates the memory of one’s life after death, so too does Moby-Dick the novel come to be a sort of tombstone for the lives lost on the Pequod. That the coffin is covered with inscriptions is also apt, with it highlighting the power of writing as a form of immortality.
The arguably heavy-handedness of the symbol of the coffin and the foreshadowing of the final acts of the novel suggests Melville is purposefully trying to remind the reader of the contrived mechanics of the novel. Moby-Dick, after all, is a novel that repeatedly highlights its own construction. The heavy use of devices such as irony and foreshadowing is thus another way for Melville to expose the machinations of the plot and emphasize the influence of the writer. That Ahab’s reflections on the symbolism of the coffin come in a chapter written as a scene in a play—a technique which highlights the performative elements of the novel—further betrays this intention. Such a technique also alludes to Moby-Dick’s exploration of fate, with the reader able to see the predetermination of events in the novel, a form in which it is the writer who gets to play God.
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