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though they soar (p. 493).
    The high rhetoric is legitimate because it is not a momentary and isolated appeal to our emotions, but rather the final statement of an argument. That it takes the form of metaphor strengthens the intellectual position by embodying the thought in physical form, a representative example of how Melville uses such language. What saves these passages from excess is a fierce intelligence that fuses idea and image, and when this is done with the frequency and consistency found in Moby-Dick , it is the gift of a major poet, though in prose.
    Perhaps the most extravagant passage of this kind is, in chapter CXIX, “The Candles” (p. 576), Ahab’s speech to the corpusants. It is likely that Shakespeare’s King Lear lies behind this passage. While at work on the novel, Melville read or reread several of the tragedies, and one sees the effects in various ways, anachronistically so in the “dramatic” scenes complete with stage directions. That influence certainly strengthened the book, and Lear’s character in part contributed to Ahab. In act 3, scene 2, Lear, half crazed on the heath and beaten by the storm, begins to move toward the humility with which he ends. For Ahab, of course, there is no remedy for his obsession, which drives him and his crew to their deaths. In the measure that we are moved by Ahab’s speech, even though unsympathetic to his intent, it is because we have come to know that he is awe-inspiring in his personal force and the deranged purity of his aim. This is why the passage comes late in the book: Melville had needed time to create Ahab as a man mad and magnificent enough to berate lightning during a typhoon.
    The language here, as in many other passages in Moby-Dick , becomes almost Shakespearean in its power, through anarchism of vocabulary, strong disruption of modern word order, and great intensity of feeling. Occasional phrases even fall into the pentameter line of Renaissance drama; the speech is a version of the dramatic monologue of two and a half centuries earlier quite transformed for Melville’s purposes.

Humor
    The exalted rhetoric of this kind is all the more effective because we encounter it only from time to time: Such flamboyance can’t be sustained for long without the reader’s fatigue, and one of the reasons it is so moving in Moby-Dick is that it rises from a foundation of skeptical intelligence and good humor. The comedy in the novel is central to its power.
    The narrator had worried about how to raise his “low” materials to the level of tragedy. While he transforms the ordinary into things rich and strange through his high language, he heads off our doubts about such exaltation by making fun of his ocean world before we do. When he moves into a passage of extreme language, we respond on his terms because we have come to trust his voice, one steadily aware of what is irregular, strange, or absurd. These discordances are often played for humor even as the language creates them.
    Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg, for example, comes to carry serious meaning, standing as it does for human affection and trust in a world of suspicion and danger. Yet Melville initially presents both men as comic figures, Queequeg because of his unchanged native habits complete with filed teeth, pagan idol, and a for-sale severed head in his bag, and Ishmael because of his quaking fear at the sight of such behavior. Once introduced, however, Queequeg is used to satirize foolish contempt for alien cultures and the smug complacencies of routine religious belief. He comes to be a figure of almost pure virtue and Ishmael’s anchor to windward.
    In being amused at the world, the narrator gives us the impression that he knows what life looks like since he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He sees much that is entertainingly odd, and is not above pure slapstick when in “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (chap. LXXXII) he argues that Saint George killed not a dragon but