On Democracy of Digression: Chapter 30 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick | Zendy

Michael Kimmage | Zendy

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On Democracy of Digression: Chapter 30 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

Author(s) -

Michael Kimmage

Publication year - 2020

Publication title -

american studies journal

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

eISSN - 2199-7268

pISSN - 1433-5239

DOI - 10.18422/69-02

Subject(s) - destiny (iss module) , digression , power (physics) , democracy , authoritarianism , philosophy , art , literature , manifest destiny , art history , law , engineering , political science , physics , quantum mechanics , politics , aerospace engineering

This essay focuses on chapter 30 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, one of the novel’s shortest chapters. It contrasts bigness, destiny and Captain Ahab’s authoritarian abuse of power with smallness, free will, and digression, the democratic virtues portrayed in Moby-Dick mostly through their absence but also, in chapter 30, by their presence in the form of a pipe that Captain Ahab smokes on deck and is then compelled to toss overboard so that The Pequod might complete is star-crossed and disastrously foreshadowed voyage.

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