Monomania Psychology Analysis: Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal

mono mankindia Psychology Analysis Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal slipThis paper Moby asshole Obsession, wicked and the Passion of Ignorance, argues that monomania is a heat of ignorance. It contends that this passion of ignorance is situated precisely betwixt the type ego and the ego ideal. The ideal ego is the fantasy an individual has of themselves, a narcissistic error of completeness. It is a re extraditeation based on an image of the self contumacious at the infantile period. The ego ideal is the goal of a exploit, a movement towards an idealized self based on cozyised signifi dejectiont premature manipulation models, people admired and preferred in favour of the self. In monomania, the ideal ego seeks to eradicate the former(a), the ego ideal. This is an act of envy, an attempt to exhaust and steal the others good because it repre moves what unitary should be or could have been. much(prenominal)(prenominal) an act is never conscious. It is a passion of ignorance. The saga of superior Ahab and his obsessive appetency to obliterate the Great White Whale is nauseatedustrative of this dynamic.The yearning for absolutes is a h either-mark of monomania. Monomania is a passion of ignorance and is to be found in the bound betwixt love and hatred. It is inherently injustice because it excludes and reverses reality. In monomania, ignorance functions as a parochial and universalised c erstwhilept of reality, marked by a certainty and right which en sufficients the h offseting of others with servicemanitarian conviction and moralistic purpose. The passion of ignorance is situated precisely among the accede and the fantasy of himself. The ideal ego wishes to eradicate the other, the ego ideal,What is at the heart all psycho course of studyo system of logical behaviour is an incapacity to communicate with aspects of the self that have, as office of the self protective utensil of the psyche, been obscured because they argon in resembling manne r painful to be addressed. At the time of obfuscation, the altogether perceived path for survival has been the isolation and dissociation of some matter intrinsic. Analytical psychology recognizes that there be dark recesses people carry deep within in which footle forbidden secrets which are treated as unapproachable. These dark places and forbidden secrets are non passive, they pulsate with the presence of malignant, carnivorous crowds that reek of fear and anarchy. It is no accident that the developmental arm of analytical psychology is preoccupied to the ascertain effects of family history, for it is in the family setting that people construe the strongest and most primeval savorings, where kinds shorten on their most stark and forceful forms. A psyches experience within the context of family has its genesis at a time out front coping mechanisms are developed, originally and independent adept of security and perceptual constancy has had time to consolidate. Anal ytical psychology understands that the individual is deeply affected by the net of prehistoric experiences. They impact on the way in which present experiences are assimilated or repressed. They determine what may be allowed to come to soul and what must be assigned to the unconscious.The unconscious is occasi aned by a bit of factors, by repression, instinctual inheritance, social conditioning and repressed trauma. It john be ain or collective. In all its aspects, the unconscious represents that part of an individuals psychic creation that is, by multiple strategies, consigned to function without conscious control. Thus analytical psychology attempts inexorably to draw one deeper and deeper into a journey of opposition with ones self. It calls on the individual to overcome his defences, to transcend the bounds of secure systems he has constituted to keep full and fast experience at bay.In the record of Moby hammer, Ahab misuses his power, disregards the safety of his cre w and the profitability of the voyage, even forfeits his accept life in holy order to avenge himself on the behemoth who rob recognise him of his level. He does this, all to stay tally a confrontation with himself and his proclaim vulnerabilities.The StoryThe report of Moby Dick begins with the indistinct dustup of the narrator,Having little or no money in my purse, and postal code particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would tabloid about a little and see the watery part of the mankind. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth whenever it is a dampen drizzly November in my soul whenever I find myself involuntary pausing to begin with coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of e truly funeral I meet, and in particular whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping onto the street and me thodically knocking peoples hats off then, I invoice it high time to get to see as soon as I whoremonger. (Melville 1992 p. 1)With these words outcast the story teller announces his intention to go to sea. He misrepresents the journey to New Bedford, Massachusetts where he takes accommodation at a giant starrs inn, yet as the inn is very full he finds himself sacramental manduction a bed with a stranger, Queequeg, a graber from the South Pacific. Queequeg is a cannibal from a South ocean Island. His strange physical form appears bizarre to pariah. He is cover in strange tattoos and apart from his alien appearance has strange habits and customs. outcast is panic-struck by the encounter besides as time passes he is able to move beyond the outward exterior of Queequeg to understand that they are some(prenominal) men, and this strange creature from the South Seas, far from being a fright beast is human, and one with a particularly kind heart and disinterested spirit. The both men join forces and set out to seek pop off together as whalers. They secure make on the Pequod, a whaling watercraft decked out with the bones and teeth of its victims, Pe tholepin and Bildad, the Pequods Quaker owners, tell them of their Captain, Ahab, who on his stand voyage found that sperm whales are non defenceless victims, but creatures with teeth Ahab has had his leg ripped from him by an enormous ashen whale. The hunted became the huntsman and had struck back.The Pequod leaves the safety of the harbour in Nantucket on a piercingly cold Christmas Day, its crew a diverse mixture of nationalities and cultures. Days later, as the ship makes into warmer waters, Ahab finally appears on deck, balancing unsteadily on his prostheses carved from the jaw bone of a sperm whale. Ahabs intention to abide by and kill Moby Dick, the commodious white whale who took his leg. To Ahab, this whale is the embodiment of grievous. He must be killed and killed by Ahab. To this end he nails a flam boyant doubloon to the mast and announces to all that the man who eldest sights Moby Dick will have the coin. aboard one of these ships is a crazed prophet called Gabriel who predicts doom to all who stick with Moby Dick and the superstitious crew of the Pequod share their sea-stories of how those who hunted the whale met with ill fortune. It is not long before misfortune is seen and k at a timen by the crew. season butchering their catch, the harpooner Tashtego falls into the mouth of a dead whale which tears free of the Pequod and sinks. Queequeg dives after the drowning man, slashes into the slowly sinking head with his glossa and frees the seaman.During some other whale hunt, the black cabin boy Pip, jumps from a whaleboat and is left(p) stranded at sea. He is rescued but the trauma renders him mentally disturbed. He is left mindless and uncanny, a prophetic jester onboard the ship. hushed the hunt continues. One day, the Pequod encounters the whaler, th e Samuel Enderby. Captain Boomer the skipper has mixed-up an arm in a chance meeting with Moby Dick. As the two captains discourse the whale the contrast becomes lucid. Boomer is happy simply to have survived his encounter, and he cannot understand Ahabs lust for vengeance. Queequeg becomes ill and asks the carpenter on board the Pequod to make him a coffin in preparation of his death but he does recover, and the coffin becomes the Pequods replacement life buoy.In expectation of finding Moby Dick, Ahab orders a harpoon to be forged and baptizes this harpoon with the blood of the Pequod harpooners, and his own. Although the Pequod is still catch whales, it is the hunt for Moby Dick that always hangs over the life of the ship. Then, one day, Fedallah makes a prophesy regarding the death of Ahab. Ahab will see two hearses, the molybdenum make from American wood and he will be killed by hackamore rope. To Ahab, this means he will not scare at sea, for at sea there are no hangings and no hearses.A tropical storm encompasses the Pequod, illuminating it with electrical fire. To Ahab this is a sign of imminent confrontation and success. To Starbuck, the ships first mate, it is a bad omen and he contemplates murdering Ahab to end the obsession. The disturbance ends, but then one of the sailors plummets from the ships masthead and drownsa grave forewarn of what lies ahead. As Ahabs obsessive desire to find and destroy Moby Dick intensifies, the feisty Pip becomes his constant companion.It is near the equator that Ahab expects to find Moby Dick, and it is here that the Pequod meets two whalers, the Rachel and the becharm both have had recent fatal encounters with the Great Whale. The Captain of the Rachel pleads with Ahab to benefactor him find his son, lost in the battle with Moby Dick, but Ahab has solo one goal, to find and kill the whale. Days pass, and then, finally, Ahab sights Moby Dick. The harpoon boats are launched. Moby Dick rams Ahabs harpoon boa t, destroying it but Ahab is saved by his crew.The next day, Moby Dick is sighted once more. The whale is harpooned but again, Moby dick strikes back and once again rams Ahabs boat. Fedallah is confine in the harpoon line, is dragged overboard to his death. Starbuck saves his Captain by manoeuvring the Pequod between Ahab and the anger beast.On the third day, the boats are launched once again and are sent after Moby Dick. The whale turns and attacks the boats, and they see that Fedallahs corpse is still lashed to the whale by the harpoon line. In the turn out battle, Moby Dick rams the Pequod and she begins to sinks. Ahab, caught in a harpoon line, is hurled out of his whale boat to his death. The remaining whaleboats and crew are caught in the vortex of the sinking Pequod and dragged to their deaths. castaway, thrown from his boat at the beginning of the hunt, is the plainly man to survive. He floats, aalone(predicate) on Queequegs coffin, the only remaining flotsam from the wreckage, an isolated figure in a watery sphere.On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel that in her retracing count after her missing shaverren, only found another orphan. (Melville 1992 p. 583)An Uncanny recitalIn telling the story of Moby Dick, Melvilles narrator, outcast, engages in a process of repeat that brings the dead back to life. His narrator offers what appears to be a sober account of his real experience but in the recounting it is immediately evident that this experience is eachthing but commonplace. Melvilles faction of reality and the fantastic, the credible and the incredible, compel the contributor to accept the communicatory on its own terms. The tale confronts the reader with narratorial fretfulness in both the telling of the tale and in the revulsion of its content. Melvilles narrative method exemplifies the de-familiarisation of the familiar, the domestication of bane that characterise s the uncanny.Freud characterises the uncanny as that which arouses panic and horror (Freud 1919 p. 339) it is that class of things which lead us back to what is k right offn of the old and familiar. (Freud 1919 p.340) It is precarious, this combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, where the opposites of the homely, customary and congenial also denote the secret that is conceal and kept from sight. (Freud 1919 p. 347)We desire we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At the bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary it is extra-ordinary, uncanny. (Heidegger 1971 p. 53)Freud argues that one of the most anxiety-producing devices of the uncanny is the double. Freud considers the uncanniness of the double to be the effect of the egos projection of the heading outwardly as something foreign to itself. What is inside is experienced as sexual climax from outside, (Freud 1919 p.358) split off and isolated by dint of a process of repression and dissociation. The study may identify with another to the extent that he is not sure as shooting which identity he is or he may substitute the extraneous self for his own. In the tale of Moby Dick it is this lack of difference which dominates Ahabs kinship to the whale. While Ahab may try to establish himself as a saviour, he too, deep coldcock, is dangerous and destructive. It is this kindredness that is problematic. When it becomes too obvious that the other is contained in the self, the other becomes an object for irrational hostility. In this dynamic, both the object (the whale) and the subject (Ahab) become doubles of each other in the psyche of the person who is enmeshed in the projection. The notion of the double always inspires the subject with dread and can be summed up as a dividing and interchanging of the ego. There is an fateful cyclic r epetition of the sign trauma. It is an inescapable loop until the doubling is concluded. on base ship, Ahab imposes an irresistible dictatorship in order to pursue his obsession. Moby Dick had injure him and that fact contravened Ahabs entire view of how the foundation should be ordered. The self-righteous, imposing Captain of the Pequod smoulders with the fires of hell. His all consuming pride and temper against the white whale snake pit in the great speech before his crew where he proclaims,That mysterious thing is chiefly what I hate and be the white whale agent, or the white whale principal, I will wreak my hate upon him Talk to me not of blasphemy, man, Id strike the sun if it insulted me. (Melville 1992 p. 167)Ahab cannot see Moby Dick for what the great while whale is, because the reality of the animal is subsumed under the passion of Ahabs projection. alone because this relationship is skewed, the rest of Ahabs world suffers. Ahab has no connection to any other person or thing beyond the white whale. It is inevitable that the whale proves to be his nemesis it is the whale that inflicts retribution and vengeance, not Ahab.The OrphanWith the first sentence of Moby Dick we are confronted with the complex figure of outcast. The narrative begins with the words Call me pariah. The name has come to typeize orphans and social outcasts but it has another aspect to it. The word literally means God hears. Ishmael, according to the Hebraical Scriptures, was the first son of Abraham, born to a slave woman, Hagar because Abraham believed his wife Sarah to be infertile. But when God granted Sarah a son of her own, Ishmael and his nonplus were turned out of Abrahams household. Isaac inherited the birthright from Abraham. Ishmael was left to die under a bush in the wilderness by his agitated and starving mother. But in her distress she cried out and God perceive her cry and the cry of the child.15When the water in the bark was gone, she cast the child und er one of the bushes. 16 And God heard the voice of the boy and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be agoraphobic for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. 18Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him. 19Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. 20God was with the boy, and he grew up he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. (Genesis 21 15 20 The account book NRSV 1988)From a Judeo-Christian perspective Ishmael was an outcast, the result of his fathers failure to believe and obey YHWHs promise to give him a son through his wife Sarah. As a consequence, Ishmael was the one repressed and rejected. But Ishmael was heard and taken care of by God.Throughout his life, Melville was preoccupied with the imagination of orphans and in particular with the character Ishma el. In Mardi he writes,But as sailors are mostly foundlings and castaways, and carry all their kith and kin in their accouterments and legs, there hardly ever appears any heir-at-law to claim their estate. (Melville 2004 p. 139)In Redburn, Melville writes, at last I have found myself a sort of Ishmael on the ship, without a single friend or companion. (Melville 1957 p. 60) In capital of South Dakota Melville writes, so that once more he might not feel himself driven out, an Ishmael into the desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany him and comfort him. (Melville 1962 p. 125) Edward Edinger argues that Melville had an Ishmael complex which had two sources personal life experience and identification with an prototypical image. (Edinger 1995 p. 23) The personal cause would be the insanity and death of his father and the ensuing hardships this caused. Melville was twelve and a half when his father died, close to the age of the biblical Ishmael who was thirteen. In addition, he was rejected by his mother, who favoured her first son. match to Arvin Newton, Melville, as an elderly man, once remarked to his niece that his mother had hated him. (Arvin 1950 p.30) The pain of his rejection is touchingly evident in the tale of Moby Dick Most of the action is seen through the eyes of Ishmael. He will thus represent the authors ego (Edinger 1995 p. 24)Ishmael, the lone survivor of this misadventure is the story teller. At the outset of the story, Ishmael presents as one who is in pain and internal distress. He is impoverished, hostile, depressed and potentially suicidal. He heads for the sea, to Nantucket to find work on a whaler. In the past he has found sea voyages as a way of containing his internal conflict and pain. But before he can find a ship, his poverty forces him to find accommodation in a squalid inn, sharing a bed with a harpooner. When the harpooner enters the room in which Ishmael is sleeping he awakes in horror at the apparition before him, a man who appears to have just returned from the ministrations of a surgeon, his face covered with sticking plaster. But that is not the reality. The harpooner is a cannibal from the pacific, tattooed in his native islander tradition. He carries a tomahawk, a seal skin purse with the hair still attached and a shrunken head. The general impression is alien, bizarre and terrifying to Ishmael. He watches from beneath the counterpane as the stranger uses the tomahawk as a pipe, then quietly turns into the bed with Ishmael. He is un certified of Ishmaels presence and reacts with instinctive aggression. In the fracas that follows Ishmael calls out in terror to the landlord for help. Landlord Watch Coffin Angels Save me (Melville 1992 p. 25) beam Coffin, the landlord, soothes the moment. He introduces the men to each other and Ishmael is suddenly aware that this frightening apparition is a person, with a name. Queequeg is no longer a nameless brutish, a cannibal with a shrunken head and a death dealing tomahawk. The tomahawk is also a peace pipe, and he shares the smoke from this unique instrument with Ishmael. The tomahawk-pipe has now become a symbol for both life and death, a symbol of reconciliation and peace. In this initial encounter with Queequeg a transformation is begun in Ishmael. In symbolic terms, he has embraced, in the symbolic form of Queequeg, both death and life as indivisible partners, and when he wakes the following morning he begins to see the world from a different perspective. Ishmael understands the mixture of life and death that Queequegs tomahawk-come-pipe represents, and realizes, at least in that moment, that such experience can lead to renewal.The Obsession,Ahab demonstrates the dangers of an all consuming focus the object of his obsession is the solitary great white whale, nicknamed Moby-Dick by the whalers. On his previous voyage, Ahab had his leg ripped off by Moby-Dick, and at the Ishmaels story begins, he has sworn to take his vengeance by hunt passel down and killing the great whale. It never occurs to Ahab that he lost his leg while trying to take the whales life and while in the process of killing countless other whales for monetary gain. Ahabs obsession has more to do with what Moby Dick represents than with the great whale himself. He saw Moby Dick as the prey and could not cope with the idea that he was not all-powerful in this relationship, that he was outdone by another creature. As Ahab reasons in a fiery speech to the crew of the Pequod, all visible objects are similar pasteboard masks that hide some unknown but still reasoning thing. Ahab hates that dark thing that hides behind the mask of appearance. The only way to fight against it, he proclaims is to strike through the mask Moby Dick, as a mysterious force of nature, represents the most outrageous, malevolent aspect of natures mask. To kill it, in the mind of Ahab, is to pull ahead for and seize the unknowable truth that is hidden from all people. He cannot believe of the concept that there is a simpler reality he is not the get over of all other species. He sees his failure to be able to take life at will as a reversal of his role as the predator and therefore can only conceive of himself now as the one preyed upon. This he cannot accept and so is driven to destroy that which in his mind denies his appropriated reality.Ahabs insane obsession and hunt for Moby Dick describes the consequences of aftermath the world as a mask that hides unknowable truth. It is Ahabs frustration with the limits of human knowledge and power that lead him to reject both science and logic and instead embrace violence and the dark magic of Fedallah his demonic advisor. akin Christopher Marlowes Doctor Faustus, he has made a pact with the devil. Thinking he is immortal, Ahab attacks Moby Dick, striking at the mask of appearance that supposedly hides ultimate truth. His loyalty to the idea that truth exists behind or beyond the physical world for ces him to destroy himself in the attempt to reach it. Ahab can only expel his illusion by dying, or killing the object upon which his illusion has rested.Ahabs ideal ego, that is the fantasy he has of himself as one who is in control and omnipotent, is in the process of destroying his ego ideal, that is, his potential as man, captain and hunter. He believes he must eradicate the evil of the whale, but in reality, because he is caught in this doubling with the whale, he is intent on murdering himself. His passion of ignorance has overwhelmed his reason, blinded him to his own seminal potential. All that is left is the passion and it knows no reason wad thus reduced inflict the traumatic pain of their void on others. The evil they engender is not just about destruction but emerges from the chaotic principle of pure drive which has loss at its subject matter and therefore must occasion more loss. The important point is not that the symbolization of what Ahab lost, but the symbolis m of the loss itself. Revenge is only want when there has been a great loss, a loss that is seen to embody an injury, and an injustice imposed by an enemy over whom victory should have been assured. Ahab lost his leg to a beast, an inferior creature. His chase for revenge could just as easily have been instituted by the loss of an arm, a child, or a father. The loss implies inferiority to a foe that is deemed to be unworthy of such a victory. Revenge becomes obsession because only with revenge can the world become again that which supports the adopted perception of order. For Ahab, revenge can only be perceived as the re-imposition of superiority and ascendancy. It is the adoption of this magic trickal sense of what order is, that gives rise to the monomania that attends a thirst for revenge. Ahabs loss of subdivision is immediate and it is personal but despite losing a leg he can still walk, he can still captain, he can still go on a whaleboat and harpoon. It is the greater lo ss which is the mechanism standing behind the driving revenge and his monomaniacal pursuit of it.As if to be human is forever to be prey to turning your ceding back of the human race, hence perhaps all of it, into some new species of the genus of humanity, for the mend or for the worse. (Cavell 1998 p.154)For this reason Ahab must inflate the object of his revenge and brace it as something larger in context. To accomplish this, Ahab must imbue Moby Dick massive power, power beyond comprehension.By placing the capacity of evil upon the whale, Ahab can fool himself into thinking that Moby Dick is a greater being than he really is and therefore his own loss appears greater than it really is. For Ahab, the delusion attendant to the psychosis of revenge suppresses the reality that he is merely a man bent on attempting to restore his lost sense of superiority. This reality is replaced with a grandiose vision of one who is a redeemer for humanity. But it is not humanity Ahab is attempti ng to redeem it is his own inflated ego whose ascendancy has been usurped.By imputing to Moby-Dick a demonic power he does not really be possessed of Ahab, blinds himself to any reality of what Moby Dick actually is, to any real expertness and intelligence that the whale possesses. This blindness springs not from mere ignorance, but from a consciously willed ignorance, from the desire not to know, from the ambition not to understand. In order to sustain his delusional conception of himself, he must appoint backup distortion to the world which surrounds him, and particularly to the object of his obsession. Ahab desperately wants Moby Dick to be inscrutable. He wants him to be a thing that is incapable of being understood, because that enables him to reason his nemesis as sheer evil. Therefore he is compelled to refuse any effort at understanding and it is this iron-willed ambition to remain ignorant, to label this thing as ultimate evil that generates the ironic twist whereby Aha b himself becomes the ultimate danger, the evil which he imagines he is seeking to eradicate. It is Ahab who causes the complete destruction of all that surrounds him.Evil and the Passion of IgnoranceAhab desires to attach to Moby Dick all the evil that exists in the world. Moby Dick is a creation of his infantile envious omnipotent sadistic phantasies. Ahab himself identifies the at long last personal source of what he sees as a universal evil when he says,It was Moby-Dick that dismasted me Moby-Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now it was that accursed white whale that razeed me made a poor pegging strong-armer of me for ever and a day (Melville 1992 p.166).Moby Dick took away Ahabs ability to literally stand on his own two feet. The loss of his leg can also be seen as a symbolic emasculation and that symbolism is made all the more apparent by the fact that Ahabs quest is for a sperm whale. Moby-Dick contains sperm Ahab does not. In his quest for revenge, all of Ahabs creative potential is voided because he cannot accept that there is a reality that is greater and stronger than himself. It is in the attempt to deny the reality and existence of that which surpasses him that he divorces himself from his own creative life potential. Captain Ahab is both the psycho parent in command of the infant and the infant overwhelmed with his own omnipotent phantasy.In the tale of Moby Dick, Herman Melville created a character whose motives of vengeance typify the behaviour of a psyc warmic person. Captain Ahab, in his delusion, could not allow Moby Dick to share the same space in his paranoid and infantile world. Ahab experienced the loss of his leg as a lethal wound that was potentially reparable only by a copy-cat act of vengeance taken upon the alleged guilt-ridden Moby Dick.That intangible malignity which has been there from the beginning Ahab did not fall down and worship it, but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he match himself, all mutilated, against it He piled upon the whales hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down and then as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot hearts shell upon. (Melville 1991 p. 187) We Cannibals must help these poor Christians.The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg is the antithesis of the relationship between Ahab and Moby Dick. Ishmael and Queequeg develop a relationship that is based on the recognition of their dissimilarity and separateness. Ahab and Moby Dick are linked together by Ahabs projection and obsession. With Queequeg and Ishmael, the difference is something to be explored. The relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael has a germ of creativity that between Ahab and Moby Dick is founded on destruction and butchery.The initial encounter between Queequeg and Ishmael provokes both terror and aggression. The landlord intervenes, calming the situation and bringing them both to an awareness of the necessity of bread and butter alongside of each other. This generates a realisation in both Ishmael and Queequeg that they are both men despite the visual and cultural dissimilarities. As time passes and conversation is enjoined, they begin to comprehend both their differences and their commonly shared out objectives. According to the customs of Queequegs home, Ishmael and Queequeg are married after a social smoke out of the tomahawk pipe. Queequeg gives Ishmael half of his belongings, and the two men continue to share a bed.The tattooed body of Queequeg is much like the patchwork quilt that covers them both as they sleep. These tattoos are a pen narrative of the universe but no one, save the prophet who grave them can decipher their meaning, not even Queequeg.And this tattooing had been the work of a bygone prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a enigmatical treatise on the art of attaining truth so that Queequeg in his own comme il faut person was a riddle to unfold a wondrous work in one volume but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.(Melville 1992 p. 491)For Ishmael, Queequeg represents the dangerous and the forbidden for which Ishmael secretly yearns. Queequeg also symbolizes the preliminary and adventurous aspect of Ishmaels personality. Once Ishmael recognizes this, his fears lessen and he embraces the savage into his life.Ishmaels initial hostility to Queequeg is a projection of the suppression of a part of his own personality. Exotic and unique, Queequeg represents the unknown. Ishmael is able to recognise this, to admit it, and to build that his fear is due to ignorance. With this awareness comes the further realisation that he, Ishmael, must plump to the sea in order to gain life experience by exploring and embracing the unknown. The friendship between the two men, although troubled by disfavor and slow to develop into a full understanding of one anothers character, is grumous with their marriage contract. They effectively become one person, illustrating the full integration of Queequegs severalty into Ishmaels personality.At the end of the book, Ishmael survives because of Queequegs coffin. In accordance with their marriage contract, Queequeg offers Ishmael protection from the sea-hawks, sharks and sea in the form of his coffin. In turn, Ishmael carries on Queequegs spirit, carved into the wood of the coffin. Queequeg represents that part of Ishmael which