ABSTRACT
What Melville says about Hawthorne—that he “says no in thunder”—has come to seem more a personal literary credo than a piece of ordinary criticism. Literally, of course, it is Ahab’s “quarrel with God,” but you don’t give your anti-hero all that energetic Shakespearian language without somewhere feeling a powerful will to denial. True, Ahab has a softer, more humane side, to which Starbuck very effectively appeals, in the last chapter before the furious three-day chase, which ends badly, of course, for all except Ishmael—who appears himself to be lost in the novel’s first printed version. But as it is probably Ahab’s defiance that we remember, it falls to the one who “escaped alone to tell thee.” Bobbing up and down on Queequeg’s coffin, he lives to write the tale Ahab himself never could.
