ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on two events in American history, the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and the insurrection at the United States’ Capitol on January 6, 2021, drawing parallels between Captain Ahab of the whaleship Pequod and Donald Trump. Both men are obsessed with a grievance that deeply wounded them; enraged, they are determined to sell a false narrative of being afflicted by forces that should be demolished. Captain Ahab is physically and psychologically dismembered by an earlier confrontation with the white whale which severed his leg. Ahab’s vengeance pulls the entire crew into his false depiction that Moby Dick is either the principal or the agent of evil itself. Defeated presidential candidate for reelection, Donald Trump shares a similar mutilation. His response is to insist on a false narrative of a stolen election; his grievance demands he be reinstated for a second term. Both leaders’ false stories lead in their own trajectories to violence, the response of distorted views that conflate fictions with facts. Violence is embedded deeply in the American psyche. Wounded innocence is the heartbeat of both insurrections, one against nature and the other against the cultural myth of America embodied in the Constitution.
