Captain Ahab is not introduced until Chapter Sixteen of the novel, and from the very first description of the legendary captain, it is quite clear that he is different from everyone else, from his physical appearance to his outlook and his desire to capture the giant whale, "Moby Dick." Another captain of the vessel says, "Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg'" (Melville 71)
By refusing to accept his situation, Ahab also defies his maiming and the authority of the unseen power behind that event. In that sense he can be viewed as the tragic hero of antiquity…" (Dubnick 65-6)
Only Ahab believes that the whale represents evil, and Ahab is both crazy and damned. (Fiedler 385) Fiedler sees Ahab's quest as one in which the man who thinks he is hunting a monster becomes a greater monster himself
Matthiessen understands this as an example of the disastrous effects that religion can have on society: Without deliberately intending it, but by virtue of his intense concern with the precariously maintained values of democratic Christianity, which he saw everywhere being threatened or broken down, Melville created in Ahab's tragedy a fearful symbol of the self-enclosed individualism that, carried to its furthest extreme, brings disaster upon itself and upon the group of which it is part. (Matthiessen 459) Matthiessen thinks that Melville does not "deliberately" intend this to be the meaning of Ahab's final action, probably because Ahab is neither "democratic" nor is he any conventional sort of Christian
Moby Dick In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the character of Captain Ahab is repeatedly referred to as a "monomaniac" (Melville Chapter 41)
As Royster notes, "Ahab has no respect for the commercial purposes of the Pequod's voyage….Ahab sets up a false opposition -- between his own wild romanticism and the commercial values of Starbuck and the owners" (Royster 322)
This is a clue to the meaning of Ahab's quest here. Clare Spark defines it as a desire to impose religious meaning on the universe even when it does not exist; she argues that "Ahab is determined to seek truth and justice, to wrench meaning from history even if the universe was created by an inscrutable, indifferent, or demonic god" (Spark 285)
The narrator says, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world" (Melville 1)