In the popular mind Moby-Dick has always been Ahab's book. A spectacular, melodramatic old sea captain, a literary cousin of Long John Silver and Captain Hook, embarks on an excitingly fateful voyage of revenge. Of course he is thwarted, but after all he is not likeable enough to succeed. The reader's vicarious daring is satisfied and his awe of the white whale lingers on. Literary critics, more concerned with the intellectual issues raised by Melville's art than with the adventurous plot, have turned their attention from Ahab to Ishmael, the author's narrator and spokesman. Ahab, who at first seemed an arch-romantic self-projection, we now tend to see as a case-study of Romantic madness, an American counterpart of the Victorian monstrous egotist typified by Emily Bronte's Heathcliff. He is also seen as an incarnation of the Romantic dark hero, rebellious towards the bourgeois world, alienated from the comforts of traditional faith, pitting himself against all obstacles to reach and rifle the secrets of the Infinite and Absolute. He is most frequently compared to Milton's Satan, Byron's Manfred and Goethe's Faust. Such a figure calls forth ethical judgments, most often unfavorable ones. The archaic Elizabethan rhetoric Melville has put in Ahab's mouth brings to mind such morally excessive hero-villains as Macbeth and Richard III, Tamerlane and Faustus. Various writers have accused Ahab of embodying the dark Puritan hatred of nature, the nineteenth-century capitalist greed for forceful acquisition, and even the insane persuasiveness of a twentiethcentury dictator. All these characterizations are certainly just in some measure; Ishmael's more prudential and speculative approach to the voyage allows us to accept the horrible truths of the story with a greater hopefulness and self-respect than if Ahab completely dominated our perception of it. But we still have to come to terms with Ahab. To dismiss him as a madman, a Satan or a Byronic egotist is too simple. For instance, much has been made