Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. This is what Emerson says and this is how he makes the world make sense. The world is not meaningless, says he. If you don’t see the meaning it is because you are far too close to it. But Captain Ahab cannot change his perspective. He wants things on a grander scale. Everything must be a story and he must be the hero. He cannot let facts exist. He must catch them in his great net and harpoon them into his narrative.

Moby-Dick is a whale. He is not a demon or a creature of vengeance. He swims in the sea and does whale things and he probably has a mother. He can remember things from before Captain Ahab was born and he can remember things from before he himself was born. He is terrifying to Ishmael and he is threatening to Ahab because he belongs in the sea and they do not.

Ishmael and Ahab are both strangers to the water. If they lived where Moby-Dick did then the blueness and the salt would stop their breathing. Ishmael’s own view of the water and its creatures seems to be encapsulated in the chapter “Cetology”. He exalts the whales. He calls them fine fellows and adores their individualism. He will not exclude anyone who qualifies from the leviathanic brotherhood. Whales to him are gamesome and light-hearted ; they are picturesque ; they are vivacious. He does not know them and he is not one of them but he smiles at them like a tourist in a new country who does not speak the language but thinks it beautiful all the same. O, Ishmael ! What has changed ten chapters later ? You have listened to a man who is in pain and you have turned that pain into your own and because it hurts too much to hold you turn it into harpoons and you aim it a at great white whale. The whiteness of the whale is terrifying to Ahab because white is an absence. Moby-Dick is an albino ; he lacks colour. Ahab lacks a leg and a home and happiness. Ishmael wants to find himself but he is becoming Ahab, just as every man on the ship is becoming Ahab. A hollow chorus of false legs ring out on the deck. We will throw our pipes in the sea like a new tea-party. We are not people any more. The world is a dichotomy of whale and not whale, and what you are not you must destroy.

When Ishmael describes Moby-Dick he may as well be describing Ahab. When Ishmael describes things that terrify him, he may as well be describing Ahab. The sea-captain is a Southern squall -- a gaunt and gauntleted ghost, an effigy of a man, all drive and no substance, all freedom and no reserve. A gauntlet is a treacherous place you must go through in order to reach your destination. Ahab becomes a blockade, to others and to himself. The revolution becomes violence. He will not accept the facts in front of him, and he will take everyone to their graves in his fruitless quest to find new ones. By God, man ! Don’t you know that the beauty of the whale lies in the fact that it is not human ? Moby-Dick does not hate you. He has neither regard for nor awareness of the motivations you stab into his sides. He is a great calm thing, much larger than you, and the only time you or your kind kill him or his is when your little needle-spears just happen to hit the right spot. Moby-Dick is not the great white God above, and you cannot make him be. He lives below the blueness and the salt, and you live above, and it has nothing to do with Heaven or Hell, and so it has everything to do with those things.