The Nature Of Free Will In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Humans have long considered the nature of free will. While many insist that their decisions give them control over the courses of their lives, external factors often render one’s tenacity inconsequential. In his Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville explores the tension between fate and man’s thirst for free will. The novel’s central narrative of the revenge-crazed Captain Ahab forcing his crew to hunt the sperm whale that took his leg, ultimately losing his own life and killing all but one of his crew, provides a powerful argument that no matter how hard an individual pursues a goal, he may fail. The world will ultimately decide the fate of each; in fact, those who try the hardest to determine their own lives pit themselves against the world and,
Such bonds limit individual free will. Speaking of the rope that binds them, Ishmael narrates, “for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded” (255). The use of a phrase used in wedding vows to affirm the permanence a marriage suggests how the bonds joining these men, and men in general, are unalterable. The religious foundation of marriage heightens the significance of this permanence as marriage is, in the eyes of the devout, a sacred oath. Moreover, wedding vows are a necessary precondition to marriage; thus, because this rope binds the two men as does a vow, it implies that such bonds between men are required for these men’s very existence. Finally, Queequeg and Ishmael make a rather comical couple: the use of marital language is ironic, suggesting that Ishmael is using humor to distance his attention from the danger of the link that binds them. By using this coping mechanism, Ishmael reveals his suppressed horror with the precarious entanglement of human life, and thus its terrible extent. Ishmael describes the rope again: “An elongated Siamese ligature united us” (255). The
Melville argues against free will by creating a world that destroys its strongest fighter for free will precisely because he insists on pursuing this defiant freedom. As Ahab grows frustrated with his inability to predict Moby Dick, he dashes his quadrant, which uses the stars for earthly navigation, to the deck: “Cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him … the level ship’s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me” (378). By shunning the stars, his most reliable navigation method, in favor of the line merely to defy the God he associates with the stars, Ahab ironically dooms himself. Ahab allows his obsession with empty gestures against free will to disturb the rational choice to use the better navigation method; Melville makes his argument for the futility of free will by making the very strides Ahab takes to achieve free will cause him disaster. He curses the objects that rely on the heavens rather than the heavens themselves and portrays the stars’ brightness, which ease navigation by them, as burning rather than helpful. Ironically, his stubborn determination to defy heaven leads him to misdirect his anger at helpful navigation tools, sealing his own fate. Ahab further says that the log and line will “show me my place on the