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out, “[M]y vengeance will fetch a great premium here !”
    Starbuck is quite rightly appalled. “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,” he sputters, “seems blasphemous.” This prompts Ahab to reveal the logic, such as it is, behind his campaign against the White Whale. According to Ahab, Moby Dick is not just a sperm whale; he is the tool of an unseen and decidedly evil power. “All visible objects . . . ,” Ahab insists, “are but as pasteboard masks.” By killing Moby Dick, he will punch through the mask and get at the root cause of all his unhappiness and pain. He then compares the world to a jail cell. “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.” Unlocking the secrets of the universe by killing a whale doesn’t make much sense, but what good is rationality to a man possessed by such a terrifying and all-devouring rage? “He tasks me; he heaps me,” Ahab cries. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
    He then directs Starbuck’s attention to the rest of the crew, all of whom are “one and all with Ahab.” And besides, he continues, what’s so terrible about pursuing a white whale; isn’t whale killing what it’s all about? “ ’ Tis but to help strike a fin,” he insists, “no wondrous feat for Starbuck.”
    Ahab finally appeals to Starbuck’s not inconsiderable vanity as a whaleman. “From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back?” When the first mate does not immediately respond, Ahab knows he has him. “Starbuck now is mine,” he exults. What Ahab does not hear as he savors “his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence” is Starbuck’s murmured “God keep me!—keep us all!” as well as the flap of the sails as the wind suddenly vanishes and, most disturbing of all, “the low laugh from the hold” of Fedallah.
    Once the grog has been passed around and the harpooneers have sworn their allegiance with a toast drunk from their harpoon sockets, Ahab retires to his cabin, where he watches the sun set outside the stern windows and reflects on what transpired on the quarterdeck. “’Twas not so hard a task,” he soliloquizes. “I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve.... What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!”

9
    Hawthorne
    S o where did it come from, this darkness, this witchy voodoo of the void? As it turns out, Melville’s incomparable ability to humanize evil came from a most unlikely, late-breaking source: a shy, soft-spoken writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Melville didn’t meet until he was almost done with the first draft. The story of their friendship and especially the letters from Melville that it produced are reason enough to read Moby-Dick, a novel that is as much about the microclimates of intimate human relations as it is about the great, uncontrollable gales that push and pull all of us.
    In the late summer of 1850, Melville thought he was finished with his whaling novel, a book that apparently hadn’t a whiff of Ahab in it. In early August, Melville’s guest in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Evert Duyckinck, reported to his wife that his host was “mostly done” with “a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery.” Then, on August 5, Melville met