| Summary: | "This essay aims to consider the political fictiveness of American ideologies in Moby-Dick through a reading of the text from the viewpoint of New Americanism, which tries to reveal the political pseudo-neutrality that America has forged and imposed upon literary canons. First of all, we see the semantic elusiveness of a white whale called Moby-Dick. Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick, shows the reader that the whale is always eluding his attempt to define it within his narrative activities based on various contexts. This seems to be because he cannot hold any particular ideological bases on which his definitions or interpretations of the whale should depend. Therefore Ishmael, if possible, grasps just a part of the meaning of the whale, for example, only when he uses the pseudo-Platonic view of Ahab's who, captain of the whaleship named the Pequod which Ishmael is aboard, is fanatically chases the whale as his lifelong enemy; or else Ishmael manages to find the significance of the whale only in the economical terms of Starbuck's, chief mate of the Pequod; and the Pequod is the point on which these two different ideologies struggle with each other for the hegemony of the world-view on the whaleship. However, even with such ideological devices of theirs, the complete understanding and definition of Moby-Dick still remains impossible for Ishmael, which means that the white whale is beyond Ishmael's representational pursuit. At the same time, both Ahab's and Starbuck's ideologies, which may be somehow effective to grasp the meanings of the whale, however prove to be destructive to the Pequod and her crew. Ahab's desperate chase of Moby-Dick, whose motive is derived from his deterministic belief that the whale is a binding reality that prevents him from gaining an ideal symbolic world of his own, eventually leads Ahab himself and all his men except for Ishmael to the complete failure of the hunting and death. On the other hand, Starbuck's Christian-dominant but utterly utilitarian view to whales -whales are either potential profits or, like the white whale, furious divinity incarnated-is also deterministic and fatal. Such ideological views of theirs to Moby-Dick retrospectively define the whale's inevitable fatality to the definers: that is, it is they that give rise to the whale as figure of fatal death, though they themselves are not aware of that. In this sense, the Pequod and her crew are overwhelmed not by the whale's malicious power itself but, ironically enough, by the pre-destined ideologies Ahab or Starbuck has given to them. Only Ishmael survives this disaster of self-destructive ideologies, which is entirely up to his own ideological drifting or unstableness. Unlike Ahab and Starbuck, Ishmael has no static ideologies with which he can see and interpret the world. This ideological baselessness of Ishmael's, however, paradoxically saves him from the fatal death that Moby-Dick brings about to the Pequod; with no particular views to the whale, Moby-Dick is no more or less than an elusive reality to Ishmael and remains so for ever, as he himself confesses in Chapter 32. This is why Ishmael can goes beyond the ideological limits Ahab and Starbuck put upon to themselves, and why he survives Moby-Dick's attack. His ideological unsteadiness keeps him out of fatal visions of the interpreted or ideologized realities and lets him drift around their margins. That Ishmeal survives the last tragedy of the Pequod, however, does necessarily not mean his luck. Rather, he is also destined to be a marginal being in the whaleship society, which is a miniature of ideologized America. Although his eye penetrates the classified and repressive world inside the Pequod and tells the reader the existences of the repressed in the world, he himself can do nothing more than that. In addition, he is forced to face the all-devouring white whale itself which he can never grasp in his own network of signification. Together with the silent voices of the repressed, he has to see his own limits of representational power of eloquence. In this sense, Ishmael encounters his ideological and thus interpretive/representative impossibilities through Moby-Dick. Such ideological limits Ishmael finds at the end of the narrative implicates the fictiveness of our perceptive realities and the limits of signification in reality which we may call the self-concealing being of ""the whiteness of the whale""."
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