MOBY- DICK AND THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

“Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner)

SYMBOLS
At a first reading, “Moby Dick”, as well as “The Old Man and The Sea” seem two novels about
the man’s struggle with nature, and the individuality of each of them is shown in the author’s
vision about the sea. If in Melville’s case, the sea represents the nature in its whole tumultuous
and dangerous being, demanding sacrifice, even from those who are initiated into its secrets, the
same symbol becomes a place of reflection, of measuring strength and of Christianity in
Hemingway’s novel. Another difference is that the sea is represented in Moby Dick by its
creatures, human or animal, instead of the Hemingway’s novel where the reader is aware of it
from the title. The fact that both novels are titles at singular indicates the individuality of the
struggle, in the one hand, and, on the other hand, the conscious and the unconscious meaning of
the sea, revealed in both cases.

For Melville, the sea is a “she”, as the boat, Pequod, and the captain and his crew represent the
male, the conscious part of the entire equation between the sea and the boat. Hemingway sees the
sea in Santiago’s eyes as a source of food and not a source of desire to conquest or control.
Santiago talks to the sea, to its creatures, demanding them forgiveness when they are killed by
him. The relationship between Santiago (the Old Man, old as the sea) is a relationship based on
the trust of each other forces, bravery and honor.

The captain of the boat Pequod, Ahab, is in search of revenge, because the white attacked him
and drown into the depth from where he emerges without a leg. The lesson is not understood and
Ahab wants to kill Moby-Dick, as a price of being helpless. And with this literary device, the
reader can find a clue about what will happen: the death of Ahad drown by a Moby-Dick
harpooned into the depth of the ocean where the white whale has its kingdom. So, prom
Melville’s point of view, the sea/the ocean is not a symbol of life, but of death, death seen as a
lack of knowledge. In Hemingway’s novel, the knowledge of the Old Man, the way he behaves
with the boat, the fish, the sea, is not a prefiguration of death, but one of the dignity and honor in
death.

We can notice the biblical references in both novels: for Melville, all this search of Moby-Dick
can be interpreted as a search of Graal, the saint chalice where is the blood of Christ, but Ahab,
inspite the fact he has all the qualities required from a fisherman, has not the empathy for the
force, the dignity and the strength of his enemy. He doesn’t recognize them, he is not aware that
ii is the entire world he is struggling, he understands only the killing the whale as a trophy.

As for Hemingway, the biblical reference is in another symbols of Christ’s sacrifice: the cut in
his hands, as the nails in Christ’s hands, the rope which crosses his shoulders to maintain by the
strength the marlin reminds the reader of the Christ’s cross in his way to Calvary.

There is no victory neither in Moby-Dick, nor The Old Man and The Sea, there is death and there
is, for Santiago and Ismael, life after death. The symbol of the life emerges from the sea in those
characters because they are aware of the power which they will confront, they regard with fear
and respect the holiness of that universe they enter, Santiago as a initiated and Ishmael as one to
be initiated, and I think that is the reason, or the least one of them, why Ishmael remains alive:
once the initiation finished, he is the one to tell the story of the great white whale.

Santiago, who dies after the death of the marlin and the bringing it to the shore, will live, first of
all, in the memory of the tourists, of the other fishermen, and secondly, by Manolin, who will
preserve the teaching of fishing that Santiago masters, becoming not only his apprentice, but the
next old man, for in Hemingway’s perception old means full of wisdom, of knowledge, of
empathy with the surroundings, the sea, and the universe.

Moby-Dick, as a representative creature of the sea, embodies its power to destroy, to go down
the depth of the water, where no man can be unless he is dead. No wisdom, no knowledge of that
underground world will be permitted to Ahab, because he is not a man of dignity. That is why
Ismael will not follow the same path as Ahab, but will be only the narrator (of the entire novel in
fact) of the lost battle between the man and the nature.

Another symbol related to the sea is the knowledge, symbol that becomes one of the major one
because it represents the relationship between two forces: humankind and nature. Man can be
able to “read” and comprehend the nature, not to try to demolish it, because the nature is the
unknown part, the unconscious part of the human being. Not to be aware of it leads to vanity, to
despite, to death, but the nature shows to the man different imageries which can help him to
understand it: the coffin represents at the same time the life and the death of Queequeg in a
morbid way: being ill, he builds the coffin, and he recovers (life) from his illness, the coffin
replaces the Pequod’s life buoy. But the character will die defending Ishmael, and the coffin
finds once again the primal significance. One can wander why Ishmael lives, and the answer is
not in the book, is in ourselves, in our comprehension of significances of the nature. Ishmael
notices all he sees, all that is strange, the whole whale, from the white of its body to the black of
his mouth, and the blue of his winglets, so he notices the non-colors of Moby-Dick, explicit
image of life and death, and the blue of the depth of the ocean (read unconsciousness). This fact,
this knowledge will keep him alive, as his desire to observe, to respect the greatness of that
unbelievable universe dominated by a giant. From this point of view, one can draw a parallel
between Santiago and Ishmael, both of them aware of the unconsciousness of themselves.

Even if there are differences between the two novels, the symbols used to express the
relationship between the man and the nature, are the same, the significance the authors embody
those symbols is representative for each one of them: for Melville, they are turned up in order to
express the limits of knowledge and for Hemingway these symbols are representatives for the
life after death. Even though, I consider that the both novels are connected in their search of a
meaningful work, as a fisherman, as a whale hunter, as a writer. In both novels, there is a little
part of Melville and of Hemingway’s lives.