In an early chapter of Moby-Dick, the narrator circles around the question of what it might mean to render the mode of dignity and grandeur proper to the democratic subject:

The narrator draws a distinction here between ‘man, in the ideal’ and men, who ‘may seem detestable as joint stock companies and nations’. This distinction, he suggests, will give a paradoxical quality to his writing, causing him to ascribe ‘high qualities’ to ‘low’ subjects such as ‘meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways’:

Starting from the presupposition that Moby-Dick constitutes an attempt to write as if the Declaration of Independence made a difference, this chapter will explore the question of what such an attempt might entail. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne from the period of the novel's composition, Melville hints at a heresy at the heart of the novel, describing it as ‘broiled’ in ‘hell-fire’, and as having a secret motto: ‘Ego non baptiso te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.’ The heresy turns out to be Ahab's Promethean attack on nature – the words are placed in his mouth as he baptises his newly forged harpoon in the blood of several of the ‘pagan’ members of his crew – but I want to look past this moment of high drama at a different mode of heresy, one that also shapes the text, disrupting and warping the categories that structure its representation of the doomed crew of the Pequod.