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By Root 5458 0

in American literature (as in the friendship between Huckleberry Finn and the runaway black slave Jim). This duality almost invariably represents the coming together of two halves to make a potential whole. The `civilised' white man, separated from nature, represents `ego-consciousness, with all its limitations; his dark-skinned companion, closer to nature and the world of instinct, embodying the `feminine' values of feeling and intuition, represents the `dark unconscious' from which the hero has become split off. Both are necessary to achieve the whole. But in Moby Dick the new partnership of Ishmael and Queequeg is not a prelude to the process of Ishmael's maturing to eventual Self-realisation, which might have provided the central theme of the story. For at the moment where they sign on as crew-members of the Pequod, Ishmael and Queequeg more or less fade into the background. This is where the the real theme of the story begins to take over.

Few novels are more overtly shot through with the `rule of three' than Moby Dick, from the moment Ishmael chooses the three-masted Pequod, the third of `three ships up for three-year's voyages'. The ship has three white men as mates, each with his `dusky harpooner: Tashtego the North American Indian, Dagoo the black American, Queequeg the Polynesian. The crew is so cosmopolitan, representing all the races of the world, that it is a microcosm of humanity. But its central figure is the one-legged, `monomaniac' Tyrant, Captain Ahab. The overwhelming power of his dark obsession, from the moment when, with `three heavyhearted cheers' from its crew, the ship `blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic', dominates the rest of the story.

We soon learn that the real shaping plot of the book is a combination of a Quest and Overcoming the Monster. When Ahab assembles his crew and nails to the mainmast a Spanish gold piece, he unfolds the real purpose of their journey: to track down and take vengeance on the `accursed white whale' which years before had stove in three of Ahab's whaleboats and `reaped away his leg `as a mower a blade of grass in the field'. The gold is to be the prize for he who first sights their goal. And when Ahab first tells them of Moby Dick, we are left in no doubt that this `treacherous', hideously deformed creature, with its massive humped back, its misshapen jaw, three holes in its starboard fluke, is an archetypal monster. Calling up rum for the crew, Ahab summons the three mates with their harpooners and, in a parody of a religious ceremony, adjures them to a solemn oath:

`now three to three ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices ... drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow - Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!'

We gradually learn that this `murderous monster against whom I and all the others had take our oaths of violence and revenge' is far more than any mortal creature. Not only is it `a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which has caused injury or death to countless mariners in almost every part of the seven seas; it has inspired such superstitious dread that there was an:

`unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.'

Such an inversion of normality does this phantasmagoric creature represent that even its colour is a clue to its treacherous nature. As Ishmael recalls, `it was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me'; before holding forth on how the colour white, commonly associated with innocence, purity and light, can often be a mask to what is cruel, sinister and dark.

From here on, the narrative alternates between two themes in counterpoint. On the `upper level' we follow the human drama of what is happening on the Pequod, as it continues across the ocean wastes in search of their elusive goal, driven by the demonic obsession of its captain; a journey fraught with every kind of omen and foreboding, like the moment when, as the boats are launched to