From Gustav Dore's Illustrations                                From Rockwell Kent's Illustrations

        At first glance, Milton and Melville may seem strange bedfellows, much like Ishmael and Queequeg, one being a poet of faith and the other of disbelief, one engaged in the poetics of celebration and the other of lamentation. In many ways, both are the inverse of each other and that is where their similarities lie. Both ask the ultimate questions of life, both possess mythic and epic imaginations, both bring God to the bar, but both come away with very different answers to the meaning of man’s place in the universe. For Milton God’s providential plan benevolently unfolds in the face of sin and suffering, whereas for Melville, the randomness of eternity and the inscrutability of the divine decree is the only certainty in the face of that very same sin and suffering. Both men are searching for certainty, and rest contentedly or discontentedly in what they find. In many ways Melville is the Milton without faith and Milton is the Melville of disbelief. Their bond is not casual or accidental. Both are shaped by a cosmic sense of divine purposefulness.

        Melville’s indebtedness to Milton is immense, Moby-Dick being the Romantic misreading of Paradise Lost on a whaling ship with Ahab/Satan as the heroic protagonist of the narrative and the White Whale as an inverted image of Milton’s benevolent Father. Milton’s constant invocations to Light echo Melville’s repeated allusions to the whiteness of the whale. Both authors surrender themselves to the majesty of the sublime, striving for, in their own peculiar way, a glorious self-annihilation. The Miltonic and Melvillean narrators share a unique bond with one another, each assuming the biblical role of inspired prophet, each guiding the reader with an authoritative voice, and each proclaiming his own unique vision of the cosmos. Both are august yet familiar in their discourse, employing exalted language to bear the burden of their mighty themes, and investing their epic songs with all the dignity and fullness of sacred truth. Mystic and Mariner alike, they are bold in their inquiries, and like Job, struggle with the iniquity of evil. Melville, like Milton, attempts to justify the ways of God to men, and although he has little compunction in troubling his reader’s conscience, will not leave him totally disconsolate. For in the wake of Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick, both men maintain, with solemn serenity, the paradise within. Whether the stupendous wreck be either Eden or the Pequod, the reader, like Adam and Ishmael, also sees himself as another orphan; but most importantly, he never forgets that in some strange, incalculable way, he has participated in the celestial drama, unraveling, but briefly, a strand in the divine tapestry.

                                                                                                                                -Written by Dr. Marc Ricciardi