Call him Ahab, and the book will not let you stop at the name. The captain of the Pequod has been bitten by the world in a particular place, and he has promoted the bite to a worldview. The white whale is malice, or blankness, or a dumb brute that happened to take a leg. Ahab needs it to be a face. Without a face, the wound is only accident, and accident cannot be hunted.
Melville’s genius is to let the hunt be many books at once. Cetology, sermon, Shakespearean rant, the labor of the crew: the novel keeps offering other ways to be at sea than Ahab’s way. Starbuck would like to make a living. Ishmael would like to tell. Queequeg would like to be a friend. Ahab uses them anyway. Monomania is a social form. It hires.
The whale’s forehead is the unreadable. Pip, dropped overboard, sees the empty behind the world and comes back unstrung. Ishmael, who survives by chance and by coffin, is left with a story that does not close the wound it describes. That is why the book still feels dangerous. It is not an adventure that ends when the animal dies. It is a theory of what a person will do rather than admit that the universe does not owe him a meaning.
Put Ahab beside Kurtz and the family resemblance is obvious: a European will, far from home, talking itself into a god. The difference is medium. Ahab has a whale; Kurtz has a river and a report. One cannot stop speaking; the other cannot quite say. Both leave a witness—Ishmael, Marlow—who has to decide whether the telling is a duty or another kind of hunt.