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"Universal Thump": The Redemptive Epistemology of Touch in Moby-Dick

In the closing scene of Moby-Dick, after the crew of the Pequod has been sucked into a swirling vortex and Ishmael floats “round and round . . . ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble of the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion,” Herman Melville demonstrates an inexorable fact of human existence: Individuals are alone in a vast, inscrutable universe with no access to its meaning, if, indeed, the universe has meaning.1 Ishmael owes his survival to nothing more than chance. While many critics would agree with Shira Wolosky’s view that Melville’s use of language is a “refusal to claim absolute certainties altogether,”2 Ishmael’s fate is nevertheless unequivocal, despite the narrator’s eventual rescue by the Rachel, which, searching for “her missing children, only found another orphan” (NN MD 573). Melville’s wending text culminates in these grim ontological and epistemological conclusions regarding humankind’s solitary and incognizant state, manifested in that final, word “orphan.” Yet the ending is not as dismal as it may appear. For though only Ishmael survives, he is not abandoned, like Pip, “among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities . . . wandering from all mortal reason” (414). He is saved with his sanity intact by a ship full of people. This final fact provides a key to understanding the solution Melville provides for Ishmael’s philosophical quandaries: physical contact with other human beings. According to Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Moby-Dick marks Melville’s passage “from an author who entertained philosophical ideas into a full-fledged philosophical novelist.”3 Specifically, it challenges the tenets put forth by philosophical idealism. John Bryant’s study of the novel’s bifurcated structure