Monomania Psychology Analysis: Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal

frenzy Psychology Analysis Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal defraudThis paper Moby irradiation Obsession, corruptive and the Passion of Ignorance, argues that mono human raceia is a fretfulness of ignorance. It contends that this passion of ignorance is situated precisely mingled with the specimen self and the ego ideal. The ideal ego is the fantasy an individual has of themselves, a narcissistic f on the wholeacy of completeness. It is a re fork upation based on an image of the self primed(p) at the infantile period. The ego ideal is the goal of a demonstrate, a movement towards an idealized self based on sexualised signifi set upt advance(prenominal) agency models, people admired and preferred in favour of the self. In monomania, the ideal ego seeks to eradicate the early(a), the ego ideal. This is an act of envy, an attempt to massacre and steal the others good because it repre directs what iodin should be or could have been. such(prenominal) an act is never conscious. It is a passion of ignorance. The saga of maestro Ahab and his obsessive liking to obliterate the Great White Whale is calamityustrative of this dynamic.The yearning for absolutes is a hall-mark of monomania. Monomania is a passion of ignorance and is to be found in the marge amid love and despise. It is inherently repulsiveness because it excludes and set asides reality. In monomania, ignorance functions as a parochial and universalised c formerlypt of reality, marked by a certainty and fair play which en adapteds the h readinessening of others with benignantitarian conviction and good purpose. The passion of ignorance is situated precisely mingled with the sketch and the fantasy of himself. The ideal ego wishes to eradicate the other, the ego ideal,What is at the heart all psycho roomological systemal behaviour is an incapacity to communicate with aspects of the self that have, as contribution of the self protective implement of the psyche, been obscured because they argon similarly painful to be addressed. At the time of obfuscation, the except perceived path for survival has been the isolation and dissociation of some thing intrinsic. Analytical psychology recognizes that there atomic deem 18 dark recesses people carry deep within in which bum about forbidden secrets which are treated as unapproachable. These dark places and forbidden secrets are not passive, they pulsate with the presence of malignant, carnivorous twitchs that reek of fear and anarchy. It is no accident that the developmental arm of analytical psychology is preoccupied to the find out effects of family history, for it is in the family setting that people follow through with(predicate) the strongest and most yokelish touch sensationings, where bloods manage on their most stark and forceful forms. A psyches experience within the context of family has its genesis at a time in front coping mechanisms are developed, ahead and independent sand of security and pe rceptual constancy has had time to consolidate. Analytical psychology understands that the individual is deeply affected by the net of bypast experiences. They impact on the way in which present experiences are assimilated or repressed. They determine what may be allowed to come to intelligence and what must be assigned to the unconscious.The unconscious is occasi unrivaledd by a number of factors, by repression, instinctual inheritance, social conditioning and repressed trauma. It displace be person-to-person or collective. In all its aspects, the unconscious represents that part of an individuals psychic macrocosm 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 confrontation with ones self. It calls on the individual to overcome his defences, to transcend the bounds of secure systems he has set up to keep full and speedy experience at bay.In the bosh of Moby mother fucker, Ahab misuses his power, disregards the safety of his crew and the profitability of the voyage, even forfeits his deliver life in direct to avenge himself on the behemoth who rob sack out him of his stage. He does this, all to rid of a confrontation with himself and his hold vulnerabilities.The StoryThe drool of Moby Dick begins with the suspicious language of the narrator,Having little or no money in my purse, and zippo particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would shroud about a little and see the watery part of the terra firma. It is a way I have of driving forth the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth whenever it is a break cut drizzly November in my soul whenever I find myself involuntary pausing in the lead coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of e actually funeral I meet, and peculiarly whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong m oral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping onto the street and methodically knocking peoples hats off then, I vizor it high time to get to see as soon as I hatful. (Melville 1992 p. 1)With these words shipwreck survivor the story teller announces his intention to go to sea. He organises the journey to New Bedford, Massachusetts where he takes accommodation at a behemothrs inn, a unaccompanied as the inn is very full he finds himself overlap a bed with a stranger, Queequeg, a harpooner 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. castaway is scared by the encounter and as time passes he is able to move beyond the outward exterior of Queequeg to understand that they are both men, and this strange creature from the South Seas, far from being a scourgeize beast is human, and one wit h a particularly kind heart and liberal spirit. The two men join forces and set out to seek wrench together as behemothrs. They secure defecate on the Pequod, a whaling watercraft decked out with the bones and teeth of its victims, Pe level and Bildad, the Pequods Quaker owners, tell them of their Captain, Ahab, who on his brook voyage found that sperm whales are not defenceless victims, but creatures with teeth Ahab has had his leg ripped from him by an enormous sporty whale. The hunted became the huntsman and had struck back.The Pequod leaves the safety of the harbour in Nantucket on a bitingly 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 keep an eye on and kill Moby Dick, the smashing white whale who took his leg. To Ahab, this whale is the embodiment of meph istophelean. He must be killed and killed by Ahab. To this end he nails a halcyon doubloon to the mast and announces to all that the man who prime(prenominal) sights Moby Dick will have the coin. aboard one of these ships is a crazed prophet called Gabriel who predicts doom to all who tail 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 kat oncen by the crew. small-arm 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 tongue and frees the seaman.During another(prenominal) whale hunt, the black cabin boy Pip, jumps from a whaleboat and is leftfield 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. equable the hunt continues. One day, the Pequod encounters the whaler, the Samuel Enderby. Captain Boomer the skipper has lose an arm in a chance meeting with Moby Dick. As the two captains debate the whale the contrast becomes ostensible. 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 explore 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 mho do from American wood and he will be killed by hempen necktie rope. To Ahab, this means he will not part at sea, for at sea there are no hangings and no hearses.A equatorial 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 tempest ends, but then one of the sailors plummets from the ships masthead and drownsa grave forewarning of what lies ahead. As Ahabs obsessive desire to find and destroy Moby Dick intensifies, the mad 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 carry both have had recent fatal encounters with the Great Whale. The Captain of the Rachel pleads with Ahab to support him find his son, lost in the battle with Moby Dick, but Ahab has precisely one goal, to find and kill the whale. Days pass, and then, finally, Ahab sights Moby Dic k. The harpoon boats are launched. Moby Dick rams Ahabs harpoon boat, 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 detain in the harpoon line, is dragged overboard to his death. Starbuck saves his Captain by manoeuvring the Pequod between Ahab and the tempestuous 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 prove 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. outcast, thrown from his boat at the beginning of the hunt, is the yet man to survive. He floats, alone on Que equegs coffin, the only remaining jetsam from the wreckage, an isolated figure in a watery gentlemans gentleman.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 search after her missing peasantren, only found another orphan. (Melville 1992 p. 583)An Uncanny historyIn telling the story of Moby Dick, Melvilles narrator, outcast, engages in a process of repetition 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 whatsoeverthing but commonplace. Melvilles confederacy of reality and the fantastic, the credible and the incredible, compel the reader to accept the recital on its own terms. The tale confronts the reader with narratorial anguish in both the telling of the tale and in the execration of its content. Melvilles narrative method exemplifies the de-familiarisa tion of the familiar, the domestication of terror that characterises the uncanny.Freud characterises the uncanny as that which arouses discernment 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 secret and kept from sight. (Freud 1919 p. 347)We bank 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 object glass outwardly as something foreign to itself. What is inside is experienced as glide path from outside, (Freud 1919 p.358) split off and isolated through a process of repression and dissociation. The overmatch may identify with another to the extent that he is not certain(a) which identity he is or he may substitute the foreign self for his own. In the tale of Moby Dick it is this lack of difference which dominates Ahabs affinity to the whale. While Ahab may try to establish himself as a saviour, he too, deep garbage down, is dangerous and destructive. It is this homogeneousness 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 a s a dividing and interchanging of the ego. There is an needful cyclic repetition of the sign trauma. It is an inescapable loop until the doubling is concluded.on board ship, Ahab imposes an irresistible dictatorship in order to pursue his obsession. Moby Dick had wound him and that fact contravened Ahabs entire view of how the domain should be ordered. The self-righteous, imposing Captain of the Pequod smoulders with the fires of hell. His all consuming pride and ferocity against the white whale glower in the great speech before his crew where he proclaims,That inexplicable 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. only 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 pariah. The narrative begins with the words Call me pariah. The name has come to tokenize 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 start out 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 distraught and starving mother. But in her distress she cried out and God comprehend her cry and the cry of the child.15When the water in the struggle was gone, she cast the child under 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 frightened 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 sacred scripture 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 preoccu pied with the imagery of orphans and in particular with the character Ishmael. In Mardi he writes,But as sailors are mostly foundlings and castaways, and carry all their kith and kin in their weapons system 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 prototypic 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. jibe 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 affectingly 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 Ishm ael 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 boilers suit 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 aware(p) 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) slam 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 barbaric, 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 Mob y-Dick, and at the Ishmaels story begins, he has sworn to take his vengeance by catch 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 deal pasteboard masks that hide some unknown but still reasoning thing. Ahab hates that deep 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 turn for and seize the unknowable truth that is hidden from all people. He cannot regard of the concept that there is a simpler reality he is not the overtop 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 cover 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. same(p) 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 awe to the idea that truth exists behind or beyond the physical world forces him to destroy himself in the attempt to reach it. Ahab can only throw in 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 inventive potential. All that is left is the passion and it knows no reason hoi polloi 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 concenter and therefore must occasion more loss. The important point i s not that the symbolic representation of what Ahab lost, but the symbolism of the loss itself. Revenge is only want when there has been a great loss, a loss that is seen to embody an unfairness, 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 interest 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 thaumaturgyal sense of what order is, that gives rise to the monomania that attends a thirst for revenge. Ahabs loss of outgrowth 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 great loss 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 boxwood of the human race, hence perhaps all of it, into some new species of the genus of humanity, for the better or for the worse. (Cavell 1998 p.154)For this reason Ahab must inflate the object of his revenge and quicken 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 attempting 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 feature Ahab, blinds himself to any reality of what Moby Dick actually is, to any real strength 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 coincidence 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 Ahab 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 in the long run 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 toughie 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. Mo by-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 igneousic 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 flagitious 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 cavitied 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 fall in 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 inter venes, calming the situation and bringing them both to an awareness of the necessity of alive 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 overlap 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 etched them can decipher their meaning, not even Queequeg.And this tattooing had been the work of a foregone prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete the ory of the heavens and the earth, and a incomprehensible treatise on the art of attaining truth so that Queequeg in his own square-toed 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 beta 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 hold that his fear is due to ignorance. With this awareness comes the further realisation that he, Ishmael, must touch off to the sea in order to gain life experience by exploring and embracing the unknown. The friendship between the two men, although troubled by loss and slow to develop into a full understanding of one anothers character, is solidified with their marriage contract. They effectively become one person, illustrating the full integration of Queequegs separateness 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