Moby Dick Rhetorical Analysis

As large as a whale, Moby Dick by Herman Melville stands as a cornerstone of American lit. Fraught with rich stories of the maritime voyage led by Captain Ahab, the quest for the ever mentioned whale persists. However, the whale only appears within the last fifth of the monstrous novel. Melville uses the other four-fifths to set the portentous battle stage: Moby Dick versus Ahab. At times of great bore, the novel seems to drag on with its frequent immense descriptions, allusions, asides, songs and soliloquies that all together make Moby Dick something of literary beauty. These stylistic elements of lingual beauty continuous throughout the novel are what make Moby Dick so rewarding in its completion and its journey. In the fourth sentence

Former whaler, Father Mapple leads the congregation. He is described as “sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth… peeping forth even beneath February’s snow” (67). Melville uses a metaphor of the spring time when the first sproutings and life begin to burst forth from the snow. Mapple represents the aging man who emerges in understanding of his place beneath a superior authority, contrasting to Ahab who resents superior authority and commands with full autonomy. The description of the pulpit as “in the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows” (69). Fashioned in such a way to resemble the front of the ship, the pulpit represents the captain leading the congregation, which is the shipmates in mass, in battling against storms, either in the battle of life figuratively or literally against a raging sea. Turning from the pulpit to the ladder, a peculiar design, out of purpose by the architect to fit the small chapel, the ladder serves functionality and symbolism. Father Mapple pulls the ladder up “till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec” (68). Father Mapple’s action symbolizes the detachment of a ship embarking on a journey to sea. This detachment cuts him off from worldly matters, in turn focusing on the spiritual and abstract. This act is further conveyed by Melville as an “act of physical isolation… from all outward ties and connections”(68). Juxtaposing this idea to Ahab’s view that physical isolation demands no spiritual movement or sense of something beyond, rather Ahab’s views on destiny and on placement as chief captain renders him unwilling to submit to a higher being like Father Mapple. The workings of the Chapel as a the pulpit an image of the ship, the ladder an image of isolation, and Father Mapple himself as an idea of man submitting all work to Melville's extended