Captain Ahab

Ahab is named for the biblical story of Ahab in the Books of Kings 16:28–22:40, the evil idol-worshipping ruler. This association prompts Ishmael to ask, after first hearing Ahab's name: "When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?" He is rebuked by one of Ahab's colleagues, who points out that "He did not name himself."[17]

For Melville's allegory the single most important thing was that Ahab "did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him" in 16:30–31.[18] The biblical Ahab foreshadows the tragic end of Captain Ahab and the essential duality of his character. Both Ahabs are shrewd in their secular associations. The captain is successful in whaling, with a record of forty years. "The very evidence of this success," Nathalia Wright observes, "is fantastically like that in King Ahab's story: Captain Ahab, too, lives in an ivory house, 'the ivory Pequod' as it is often called, tricked out in trophies of whale bones and teeth from profitable voyages."[19] The ship's last voyage, however, is not entirely commercial: from the moment Ahab attaches the golden doubloon on the mast, it becomes a pursuit of a perceived enemy, under a captain unable to compromise. King Ahab, an able politician but a patron of foreign gods, offended Jehovah (YHWH) by introducing Baal as a god. Jehovah tolerated no other gods and contrived with false prophets to destroy King Ahab.[20]

Like his eponym, Captain Ahab worships pagan gods, particularly the spirit of fire. Fedallah the Parsee, his harpooner, is a fire-worshipping Zoroastrian. Fedallah makes three prophecies regarding Ahab's death:

• That before he dies, he must see two hearses, one not made by human hands and one built from American wood
• That Fedallah will die before him and serve as his pilot into death
• That only hemp can kill him

Ahab interprets these prophecies to mean that he cannot die on land or sea, but they prove to be accurate if cryptic predictions of his death.[21] Fedallah is swept off Ahab's whaleboat during the final three-day chase, and Ahab later sees his corpse bound to Moby Dick with a harpoon line. The whale proves to be the first of the two hearses; the Pequod becomes the second when it sinks with the loss of all hands aboard. The line around Ahab's neck serves as the fatal hemp, and Moby Dick's final dive allows Fedallah to lead Ahab to his death.

Charles Olson mentions three modes of madness in King Lear, the King's, the Fool's, and Edgar's, allegorized in the book, with Ahab taking the role of Lear and Pip the roles of both the Fool and Edgar.[22] Melville makes his points by way of contrasts to Shakespeare. Olson identifies the typhoon in chapter 119, "The Candles," with the storm in Lear. "Ahab, unlike Lear," Olson observes, "does not in this night of storm discover his love for his fellow wretches. On the contrary, this night Ahab uncovers his whole hate."[23] Later, in chapter 125, "The Log and Line," Ahab says to Pip, in Lear's words to his Fool, "Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou are tied to me by chords woven of my heart-strings."[24] While Sweeney endorses Olson's identification, he finds exaggerated the claim that Ahab learns from his cabin-boy just as Lear does from the Fool. Ahab learns "little or nothing" throughout the book.[25]

Milton's Satan is "not the least element of which Captain Ahab is compounded," says Nathalia Wright.[26] The words with which Ishmael and Starbuck portray him—infidel, impious, diabolic, blasphemous—describe him as a towering rebel.

In "The Candles" (Ch 119) Ahab's harpoon is called a "fiery dart." The phrase is taken from book XII of John Milton's Paradise Lost, as Henry F. Pommer recognized, where Michael promised Adam "spiritual armour, able to resist/ Satan's assaults, and quench his fiery darts" (XII, 491-2).[27] Pommer argues that Milton's work was more immediate than Shakespeare, because while some of Melville's soliloquies appear to find their prototypes in Shakespeare, "there is a slight step from dramatic monologue to fictional thought," and Milton "had already taken that step, using, in his own extended narrative, soliloquies precisely like Melville's."[28]

Further allusions identify Ahab with Satan. Milton's scene set in Hell includes the lines "Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit/Chew'd bitter ashes, which the offended taste/With spattering noise rejected" (X, 565–567),[29] and Moby-Dick chapter 132, "The Symphony," has "like a blighted fruit-tree he [Ahab] shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil."[30] On the last day of the chase, Ahab evokes the Creation: ""What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summerhouse to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world." Later that day Moby Dick, "seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven," sinks the ship. Tashtego hammers a sky-hawk to the mast: "And so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upward, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it." Pommer finds "most impressive of all" the Latin in chapter 113, "The Forge," with which Ahab cries: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli."("I baptize thee not in the name of the Father but in the name of the devil").[31]

Ahab's scar may have been modeled on the description of Satan's face, which "Deep scars of thunder had intrench'd." (I, 600–601) [32]

The greatness and woe of both Satan and Ahab lies in pride. "The proud person," Pommer explains, "believing that he deserves treatment appropriate to his self-inflated dignity, is quick to anger when he receives a less welcome treatment. At the exaltation of the Messiah, Satan 'could not bear/Through pride that sight, and thought himself impair'd.'" Satan's "sense of injur'd merit" is reported in his first speech in Hell. Ahab's story, caused by Moby Dick biting off his leg, follows the same psychological pattern of being spiritually and physically impaired.[33]

Overlapping with Lear, the typhoon scene in "The Candles" also seems to be Melville's recreation of the mythic theft of fire. Prometheus accomplished his theft by the stealthy hiding of the divine spark in a fennel stalk. In contrast, "Ahab's theft is a boldly defiant deed, set amidst elemental nature in furious eruption."[34] The whole business of whaling is a theft of fire, for the sperm whale's oil is used as fuel for flames. The hunt for the White Whale, described by Ishmael as "the fiery hunt," thus represents a conflict with a deity—hence the references to Moby Dick as a god.[34] Ahab waving the fiery harpoon is Melville's "modified equivalent of Prometheus's smuggling from heaven the fire-laden fennel stalk."[35] Both Prometheus and Ahab try to alter or reverse "the supernatural design, and herein lies the acme of their tragic hubris." Prometheus, mistakenly convinced that Zeus planned the destruction of man, stole fire in order to contravene the will of the god; Ahab, thinking his mind can penetrate the mystery of evil, is convinced that killing Moby Dick will "expel evil from the cosmos."[36]

In a tragedy a hero has a mad counterpart: Prometheus has Io, Moby-Dick has Pip. The madness of Io and Pip is caused by their unintentional contact with the primal elements or with the deity. "The Pip who dances and shakes his tambourine before Queequeg's coffin," Sweeney compares, "is clearly a maniac, completely detached from his former personality." Likewise, Io, tortured by the gadfly, "bursts upon the stage in a wild dance...While on the stage, Io speaks with a disjointed frenzy much the same as Pip's."[37]

In "The Candles," Ahab is temporarily stricken by blindness, an allusion to the Oedipus myth.[38] In the chapter "The Sphynx," Ahab stands before a sperm whale's head hanging from the side of his ship: "it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert." Ahab orders the head to "tell us the secret thing that is in thee." Here Ahab resembles Oedipus and the monster of Thebes, the more for his using a spade alternatively as both a crutch and as a tool with which to dissect the whale. Oedipus' staff, Sweeney notes, is both "a walking tool and the murder weapon with which he killed his father."[15] The Promethean and Oedipean sides of Ahab connect in this chapter by way of the crutch. In addition to this, blindness is alluded to. Oedipus and Ahab are intelligent and ignorant at the same time, excessively proud, and both face a riddle (the mystery of evil).[39]

The opening chapter contains an extended allusion to "that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned" (Ch. 1, "Loomings"). Ahab does not realize that the malice he sees in the White Whale is his own, "wildly projected."[40] His Narcissistic self-delusion (he is unaware that he sees himself in the whale) complements "his Oedipean self-ignorance" (he does not know who he really is). The Narcissus myth also explains why Ahab, unlike Oedipus, remains self-ignorant. While two messengers enlight Oedipus and separate him from his obsession, Narcissus and Ahab are never interrupted from theirs. The contrast between Narcissus and Ahab is that the first contemplates a beautiful image which he loves, while Ahab projects an evil image which he hates, which Sweeney calls "an ironic reversal on Melville's part."[41] In several ways Ahab and Moby Dick resemble each other:

• both are described with images of royalty, divinity, and archeology.
• both share physical features, they are scarred or wounded, and each has a prominent brow or forehead.
• both share the same internal characteristics: isolated, stubborn, vengeful, quickly enraged.
• Finally, both are "ultimately unknowable." According to Ishmael in "The Nut," all things that are mighty wear "a false brow to the common world."[42] Ahab hates the mask as much as he does the thing itself.

A subtle connection between Ahab, Moby Dick and Fedallah is formed by the imagery of the brow and forehead. According to Sweeney, Fedallah is "clearly an external projection of Ahab's own depravity" and at the same time a double of what Ahab finds most evil in the whale.[43] Fedallah is several times described using "phantom" imagery in the chapter "Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah." In Ovid's myth Narcissus has an airy counterpart in the speech-deprived nymph Echo, who can only repeat the sounds she hears. Echo is an auditory complement to the visual reflection and a foreshadowing of Narcissus' death. In the same way Fedallah, who only says what Ahab wants to hear, is an auditory reflection of Ahab's evil, of which Moby Dick is the visual reflection. Fedallah foreshadows Ahab's death.[44]

When the book was first published, reviewers mostly focused on Ahab and the whale. According to George Ripley in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for December 1851, Ahab "becomes the victim of a deep, cunning monomania; believes himself predestined to take a bloody revenge on his fearful enemy; pursues him with fierce demoniac energy of purpose."[45] Ripley admires the creation of Ahab, who "opens upon us with wonderful power. He exercises a wild, bewildering fascination by his dark and mysterious nature."[46]

During the onset of Melville's rediscovery there was no change of emphasis on Ahab and his struggle with the whale.[47] During the 1950s and 1960s literary scholars shifted their attention to narrative technique and point of view, which for Melville studies meant that the spotlight switched from Ahab to Ishmael.[48]

John Barrymore as Ahab Ceeley in The Sea Beast

The first two film adaptations show "the radical surgery that Hollywood performed on Herman Melville's masterpiece."[49] The first was a silent movie, The Sea Beast, a romantic love story in which the character of Ahab (John Barrymore), is transformed into "a handsome young sailor"[50] a New Bedford harpooner who has little in common with Ahab, not even his full name, which is extended to Ahab Ceeley. Though in the book Ahab has already lost his leg, in the film a "crude papier mache monster" bites it off.[51] When the movie opened on Broadway it made $20,000 a week and ran longer than any Warner film up to that time.[52]

Barrymore is also Ahab in the 1930 Moby Dick, this time with his voice. Ahab is "shrieking in pain" as the ship's (called Mary-Ann) blacksmith holds a fiery, hot-bladed tool against his stump.[53] Again, the whale is just a means to separate lovers. In another diversion from the book, Ahab's sweetheart is the minister's daughter, Faith Mapple. Once again, it became a hit at the box office.[54]

In 1955, Orson Welles played Ahab in a filmed production of his play Moby Dick Rehearsed; however, this film is considered "lost".

Warner Brothers' third effort was directed in 1956 by John Huston, with a script by Ray Bradbury, the first serious attempt to follow the book.[55] Completion of the script took a year, filming another year, and editing and scoring a third year. Gregory Peck's Ahab is a "stern authoritarian Lincoln in black." The otherwise positive reviews agreed that Peck was unsuited for the part.[56]

There have been two French film versions of Moby Dick: Capitaine Achab (2004), starring Frédéric Bonpart and Capitaine Achabin (2007) starring Denis Lavant.

Ahab has been portrayed on television, beginning with Victor Jory's portrayal in 1954 on the Hallmark Hall of Fame and including portrayals by Patrick Stewart in the 1998 mini-series and William Hurt in the 2011 mini-series. In films that were released directly to video, Captain Ahab was played by Barry Bostwick in a 2010 modern-age re-imagining of Moby Dick, and by Danny Glover in the 2011 film Age of the Dragons, a fantasy-themed re-imagining.

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Khan's pursuit of Captain Kirk is central to the film's theme of vengeance, and The Wrath of Khan deliberately borrows heavily from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.[57] To make the parallels clear to viewers, Meyer added a visible copy of Moby-Dick to Khan's dwelling.[58] Khan liberally paraphrases Ahab, with "I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!". Khan quotes Ahab's tirade at the end of the novel verbatim with his final lines: "To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."[57][59] Ahab also features in the later film Star Trek: First Contact after Captain Picard's vengeful campaign against the Borg draw comparisons with Melville's character, leaving actor Patrick Stewart to paraphrase Ahab as he laments his own preoccupation with revenge.

Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb is the title of a 2022 four-part sports documentary by Secret Base's Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein, about the eponymous baseball pitcher. Bois and Rubenstein liken Stieb's pursuit of a no-hitter to Ahab chasing the white whale.[60][61] Stieb, who was not involved in the documentary's production, also noted the similarity.[62]

Ahab appears quite frequently in humorous comic strips and cartoons. Without effort an entire anthology of this material (caricature, gag cartoons, editorial cartoons) could be assembled. The one strip that most often refers to Melville is Peanuts by Charles Schulz.[63] The futuristic comic book supervillain Ahab uses harpoons.

An acclaimed version of Moby Dick and Ahab was made by the trio of Argentine artists consisting of Enrique Breccia, Leopoldo Durañona and Guillermo Saccomanno, which was released in a completed and collected graphic novel format in 1979.

In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the story of Venom Snake (initially introduced as Ahab) also appears to be somewhat inspired by the fate Captain Ahab. In addition, the transport helicopter regularly used by the player is referred to as Pequod.

In This Is the Police, the main character Jack Boyd is frequently compared to Ahab.

The first boss in the indie game Noitu Love 2 – Mordecai Fluke – is based on Ahab.

The song "Beneath These Waves" (in the 2005 album Touched by the Crimson King of the metal band Demons & Wizards) sings about Ahab's will of revenge.

The alternative metal band Mastodon and their album Leviathan references him in one of their songs, with the album being based on Moby-Dick.

German doom metal band Ahab is named after the character.

Singer Bob Dylan references the character in his 1965 song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" from the album Bringing It All Back Home.

Singer Tom Waits also references the character in his song "Shiver Me Timbers" on his 1974 album The Heart of Saturday Night.

Elton John and Leon Russell’s 2010 album The Union contains a song called “Hey Ahab” based on the character.

Hip-hop duo Black Star mentions the sinking of Ahab's ship by Moby Dick on the song "Re:Definition" from their 1998 album Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star.