It’s interesting to see a Vedantic note in Melville’s analysis of Ahab’s soul loss. The sinking back into atman/soul that occurs in deep sleep in which mental modifications/vritti subside being overcome by tamas/torpour is referenced. Normally this is a state of quasi bliss without perturbation but not for Ahab:
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own.
Ahab is possessed, his nature riven by an all consuming purpose.
In his compendium of whale lore and legend Melville missed this sutra from the Bhradaranyaka Upanisad IV.iii.18:
As a great fish swims alternately to both the banks (of a river), eastern and western, so does this infinite being move in both these states, the dream and waking states.
The whale as infinite being, the emptiness that devours worlds and inanition made visible.
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