Whiteness- Moby Dick

Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; in

fact, he even dedicates the novel of the great white whale to Hawthorne, because he loved the

book so much. Both authors had a strong reaction to the Transcendentalist movement led by such

writers as Henry David Thoreau, who thought that people would ultimately do good, if

restrictions were taken away from them. Hawthorne takes a big swipe at that notion in the

opening of The Scarlet Letter, where he writes that the first two things a new town needs to build

are a graveyard and a jail, because the only two certainties in life are death and evil.

There are a number of important symbols in the famous Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. The

story is told allegorically, with each character or object in the tale having its own meaning. Also,

there are the whaling ship- the Pequod, which symbolizes doom, Moby-Dick the whale, which

stands for contradiction and the uncontrollable things in life, and a sailor’s coffin, which

represent both life and death. All of these symbols are used brilliantly by Melville, and help the

reader to understand the meaning of the book

Whiteness, to Ishmael, is horrible because it represents the unnatural and threatening: albinos,

creatures that live in extreme and inhospitable environments, waves breaking against rocks.

These examples reverse the traditional association of whiteness with purity. Whiteness conveys

both a lack of meaning and an unreadable excess of meaning that confounds individuals. Moby

Dick is the top of whiteness, and Melville’s characters cannot objectively understand the White

Whale. Captain Ahab believes that Moby Dick represents evil-the object of every negative

feeling any human being has ever had, ever- while Ishmael fails in his attempts to determine

scientifically the whale’s fundamental nature.Then, there are the superstitious sailors, who start

to think that Moby-Dick is immortal and omnipresent and invincible, almost like God.
Ishmael concluding that it could represent anything from angels to atheism and listing all the

different symbolic possibilities of the color white.

The Color White

Associated with purity and peace, the color white has mostly negative associations in Moby-
Dick, beginning with the idea of inscrutability. If you think about it, white is actually the total
absence of color -- and here, the color is associated with a total absence of meaning. Moby-Dick
is the ultimate white object, and is also completely incomprehensible -- each member of the crew
interprets the whale in the way that he sees most fit.