Naught Beyond: A Phenomenology of Ahab’s “Madness Maddened”

Abstract

This article attempts to investigate the discursive manifestations of evil in Melville’s Moby Dick. It argues that throughout the novel, Ahab speaks—and in speaking performs—the whale. He brings into presence a whale of his own making. This chapter will draw principally on Sartre’s qualifications of being (en soi, pour soi, pour autrui), on Heidegger’s work on language and poetry, and other recent critical texts on poetic theory and the phenomenology of language in order to show how, in the twenty-first century, we might, in the act of reading, understand Ahab’s purpose and the emptiness of the existential crisis Melville defines.