Ishmael’s narration of the legend of Moby Dick brings us to the plight of Ahab, a brutally heroic captain who, among the smashed litter of his boats and crew, swims at the whale with a knife and has his leg ripped off by the beast. Man of Hubris, of which Ahab appears to be the purest embittered archetype, is then placed in ancient wise, in His context among the wonders that made him what he was forgotten ages ago:

“The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it…”

“So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that

proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young

exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old

State-secret come…”

Ahab’s Awful mission, a supernatural quest, is at odds with his charge to make money for his banker masters, his investors, his economic fellows, so much less his fellows than the terrible beast he hunts:

“Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.”

Melville’s character, Flask, a figure of “pervading mediocrity,” is as predictive of the man of the managerial class that is the “blue-pilled” mainstream functionary of our age, as Ishmael is of the “red-pilled” alienated remnant of the masculine age adrift, in the sea of lies that is Modernity