The Possessed & Moby Dick

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

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whatever he wants to do. In addition, he will see his own agenda as entirely good and worthy, and therefore will forgive himself for whatever means he uses to accomplish his goals. In the case of both novels, we find men who throw into chaos everything around them as they pursue their goals. Ahab seeks to destroy the whale, and he manages to destroy his own life, if not his soul, as well as the lives of his men. The political zealots of Dostoyevsky believe themselves on a path toward building a nation and a society which will be a sort of Eden for the human beings living in it, but all they do is spread madness and destruction wherever they go. The characters in Dostoyevsky seek to bring peace ultimately, by doing away with the forces of conflict, but all they do is bring intensified conflict. They are obsessed with peace, as one character says, but the obsession is so unpeaceful that no peace will be manifest. The harder they try to impose their will on others, the more disastrous will be the result: I think I should inform you . . . that Peter Verkhovensky is some sort of a universal peacemaker; peacemaking is his role, his forte, his disease (Dostoyevsky 186). Of course, at the same time, Stavrogin at least recognizes his
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Approximate Word count = 1614
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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