This study will examine the problem of individual freedom as it is represented in two novels, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The study will argue that both authors are portraying human beings as creatures controlled by urges and impulses beyond their control. In this context, the books are arguments against individual freedom, at least in the specific cases illustrated in the two novels.
Melville paints the picture of an obsessed man driven to revenge against the whale who took his leg. Dostoyevsky paints the picture of many obsessed men who try to change a country but who in the process lose themselves.
The lesson which Ahab refuses to learn is the lesson that he is not God, that his only real freedom is surrendering to God that drive to vengeance so that he can remain a sane human being. He sees himself as God, even if only symbolically. This lesson is addressed in Father Mapple's sermon when he begins his sermon with these words: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah---'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah'" (Melville 57). What this means is that God had prepared a whale to swallow up part of Ahab in order to teach him humility, but Ahab is unable or unwilling to learn that lesson.
For the lesson to mean anything, however, it is necessary that Ahab did have freedom to stop his hunt for the whale. It would seem, to the contrary, that Ahab is thoroughly obsessed with revenge, so that he does not have the freedom to decide to change his course.
Father Mapple goes on with his sermon:
As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all. . . . The sin . . . was in his willful disobedience of the command of God---never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed---which he found a hard command. but all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do.
. . . It is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeyin...