ding self does not embrace the universe but strikes against the white wall of reality shoved near to him. He rages against this wall like one embittered by some secret betrayal. He rails against an absence of meaning in the universe when it seems it once held out a promise of redemption. Like a lover betrayed, he seeks to strike back at whatever force perniciously acts behind the pasteboard masks of the universe. Ahab thus enacts a negative reverse of Carlyle's Professor Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus who, though faced with "Cloth-webs and Cobwebs," of Imperial Mantles, Superannuated Symbols, and what not: yet still did he courageously pierce through. Nay, worst of all, two quite mysterious, world-embracing Phantasms, Time and Space, have ever hovered round him, perplexing and bewildering: but with these also he now resolutely grapples, these also he victoriously rends asunder. In a word, he has looked fixedly on Existence, till one after the other, its earthly hulls and garnitures have all melted away; and now, to his rapt vision, the interior celestial Holy of Holies lies disclosed. (Carlyle ). Ahab seeks to rend asunder, to pierce, strike through the mask of appearances, yet he hunts not for the "interior Holy of Holies" but rather to wreak his hate upon the inscrutable malignancy lurking behind the veil. Rogin comments that Ahab seeks "vengeance both against the God of his fathers and (like them) against the pagan deity of nature" (125). He rightly calls Ahab's quest an ascetic hunt (125). But Ahab's flaw, which defeats him, is his not believing his own philosophy. He is too much a realist, believing too much in the pasteboard masks. "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks." All visible objects -- including that which is Ahab. To fixate upon one external phenomenon in the wavering veil only reifies it. By focussing his hate upon the white whale, Ahab mi...
