Captain Ahab and Evil

Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Moreover, Fate is just a scapegoat if something goes wrong. Captain Ahab, a character in the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, is a victim of his own negligent actions. As a result, he faces an unfortunate death from the fury of the white whale. Ahab places all of his hate on the whale, whom is later referred to as Moby Dick, because he lost a leg to him. He thinks that Moby Dick represents all of the hatred and evil in the world, and that he must go and destroy it. Yet, he is fully responsible for his own death due to the fact that he overlooked the warning signs that Nature and God provided for him, lacked communication between him and his shipmates, and preferred to be isolated from the crew in order to fuel his monomaniac conscience to put Moby Dick to his death.

Because Ahab is the captain of the ship, he assumed that he ultimately had higher authority than God. God, in his mind, was in the wrong, by letting Moby Dick "dismember" (Melville 161) him; leading into Captain Ahab's growing fixation with the beast. While being infatuated with Moby Dick, he is forced to ignore the obvious signs from Nature that were telling him to change his plans if he desired to live. However, Ahab chose to ignore the warning signs that were thrown at him throughout the novel. One omen that Ahab chose to pay no heed to was when the Pequod "was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck [it] directly ahead" (482). The result of that typhoon was that the ship changed directions, heading West rather than East. Ahab realized this when he "turned to eye the bright sun's rays" and claimed that "[he'll] be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun" (495), meaning that the Pequod was pulling the sun along with them on their voyage to the west. To make sure that his realization was correct while "huskily demanding how the ship was heading" (495). He called to Starbuck, the first mate on the ship, to confirm. They checked the two compasses on board, which said that they were headed in the opposite direction towards the east. Ahab had declared that "last night's thunder turned [the] compasses" (495) and that they needed to be fixed in order to be correct. It was Ahab's way of still wanting to pursue Moby Dick rather than just hunting whales for a living.

As well as ignoring the bad omens hurled at Ahab from Nature, he had also lacked a sense of communication. On the first gam that the Pequod had with the Goney, Ahab does not wish to board the other ship because of "the wind and sea betoken storms" (230). Ishmael, who is the narrator of the story, tells us that he thinks that "[Ahab] cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he would contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought" on Moby Dick (230). Ahab's obsession of killing the white whale had clearly overpowered him to the point where he was not even willing to find out information about other