Harry and Ahab, Cont'd

Okay, back to Potter and eventually Ahab. But first a note on the epilogue. Necessary? I think so. I think the most important line in the book appears in the epilogue and conveys something that could not have been conveyed when Harry was 17, having just defeated Voldemort. Rowling confirms in these final pages that Harry is what is best in his mother in father, but he is not them. He has made his own path, and he can confidently tell his young son, Albus Severus, to do the same thing:
"Albus Severus,...you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew" (758). When Albus expresses his fear that the Sorting Hat will place him in Slytherin, Harry says without hesitating or even letting his son finish his sentence: "-- then Slytherin House will have gained an excellent student, won't it? It doesn't matter to us, Al" (758). Rowling's final word here is that no one person is purely good or purely evil. James Potter was not perfect, neither was Snape, and, as we learn in the end, neither was Albus Dumbledore. It is simply a matter of the good outweighing the bad in each of us in terms of the choices we make. That's where the hope lies. I kept hoping against hope that Severus Snape was good all along, and he was. He was just good enough.

Ahab is a different bird altogether. Fearless in the face of death, yes. Fearful for his soul? No. This he describes repeatedly as already dead. A casualty or perhaps even a precondition of his job as whaling captain, as he explains to Starbuck: "Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!...When I think of this life I have led..Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so gray did never grow but from out some ashes! (385). And later after a close shave with Moby Dick, he repeats these same sentiments with even more conviction: "...I account no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor White Whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being" (403). His quest is one that seems to have been born out of something already dead, or some sense that the choice was never his to begin with. A cog in the wheel of American capitalism? I don't know. At the same time, is this idea of seeking out death in the jaws of Moby Dick in some way a rebellion? A way to feel most alive? Again, I don't know. I have got to read some criticism. He does give some tiny thought to the idea of being reborn through the experience of death as he muses on the ships new life preserver (fashioned out of Queegeg's coffin after Q miraculously and willfully rises from near death): "Oh how immaterial are all material things! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin? Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality preserver? I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I to the dark side of the earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me (369).

For Ahab, it really seems to come down to the question of free will vs fate and his refusal to believe in choice: "Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invislbe power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I" (386).

And his crew simply follows along in the most slavish fashion. What is worse? To be Ahab, emotionally cut off from everything so as to sink his entire ship, or Starbuck, who knows that what is happening is wrong and yet watches it happen? This is the American epic? Back to Lear again: Fixed stars govern a life.

I'll vote for Potter any day of the week.