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Barrett Waller 12 October, 2025 Literature 201 Dr. Hoffman Very Close Analysis paper: The Turmoil of The Sea The passage in question will be Herman Melville’s, Moby Dick , Chapter 96, “The Try-works” , pages 311 through 314. There, Melville utilizes the fire emitting from the trypots and Ishmael’s foolish act behind the helm to paint a picture of psychological distress using long, hypnotic sentences, to show how the sailors, the captain, the ship, and Ishmael are driven into madness. Ishmael portrays his experience onboard the Pequod in a sequential manner that shows how he is thinking and how he grows from his experiences. While he is staring into the fire of the tryworks he is mesmerized by the flames and begins to think about how the whole ship has gone into chaos and desperation, spiraling down further and further into insanity. The climax of falling asleep at the helm leaves him feeling that much more grateful that he didn’t capsize the ship, helping him realize that things aren’t so bad after all. Melville utilizes similes, metaphors connecting the ship to hell, and alliterations to develop an intricate prose for his narration style, and incorporates these strategies inside of his long, philosophical sentences. He connects them to various references in the worlds of Ancient Greece, Christianity, and encyclopedic facts. Melville uses these strategies to make the reader feel mad themselves, and to go through the same thought process and madness that Ishmael is experiencing in the novel.
Leading up to, The Try-Works , the voyage the crew has been on leads the reader into a dark psychological and spiritual tunnel that brings them deeper and deeper into a state of madness and entrancement. There seems to be an eventual climax that is brought by the
encapsulation of Ishmael by the fire of the tryworks when he takes the helm, and begins to lose control of the ship. The chapter starts off in a heavy encyclopedic mode, as Melville gives a deep and detailed explanation of everything you need to know about whaling tryworks. He explains where the tryworks are located on the ship, and says that the kilns have strong wood beneath them because of how heavy they are. Descriptive language is used to aid the description of the works, such as “firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides”, to give a more personal feel and imaginary aspect to the novel. The use of the word “ponderous” is unnecessary if included in a textbook definition of how tryworks are fastened to the deck, but gives a more personal feel. This is the point in the chapter where Melville starts to venture away from the encyclopedic tone and more towards the philosophical tone of voice, and down a rabbit hole of entrancement. It appears that Melville opens up with more of an encyclopedic narration to give the philosophical parts of the chapter a deeper meaning and to give the reader the background information necessary to really understand the significance of Ishmael’s story.
Building on the idea of the secrecy and the unknown, Melville begins to talk about how the "cynical" old sailors will hide away in the tryworks and “coil” themselves up for a nap. Many conversations are held between the sailors occupying the tryworks and are described as “confidential”, to give these conversations a deeper meaning in the fact that they are hiding them from the rest of the crew, perhaps even the captain. Melville wants to give an idea to the reader of the unwritten rules of sailing, that is; the ship is used as a giant playground and some conversations are held in deep dark places of the ship so no one else can hear them, and sleeping on the job is a common occurrence.Melville describes being inside of the trypots as, “a place for profound mathematical meditation”. This supports the idea of sleeping on the job.
Now Melville etches into the deeper, darker, cataclysmic spiral of entrancement of the fierce fiery flames of the works. By midnight the works were in full operation, in the “wild ocean darkness” (312). The darkness was “licked up by the fierce flames”. This personification gives the reader a fierce image in their mind’s eye of the trywork flames adding to the intensity. Melville also makes use of alliterations in his description in groups like “forked forth”, “barbaric brilliancy”, and “huge pronged poles as they pitched…” to give the reader a syllabic twist in the reading. The connection to the flames of the tryworks to the “famed Greek fire”, which was a battle strategy of the Greeks to send a ship with her sails on fire into the heart of the enemy fleet to burn them down (312 footnote). This shows the self-destruction of Ishmael as he now pictures their ship as if it was burning, “as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed” (312). Melville makes a parallel between this and the flames from the tryworks, something Ishmael begins to be more and more hypnotized by.
When not on watch, the windlass serves as a “sea-sofa” to sit and watch the “red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads”. This could mean that their eyes were literally beginning to heat up, because if you are close to a fire it can burn you the longer you sit by it, or it could mean that they stare into the fire so long that they see nothing but fire and are encapsulated by it. The sailors narrated to each other their “unholy adventures”, another reference to how sailors will talk about things in confidence that are considered sinful. Melville states, “as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all
sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul” (313). This quote is the epitome of the crew going mad, while staring into the flames of the tryworks, he uses long, hypnotic sentences to make the reader feel like they are in a blurry hurricane of madness and unconsciousness. This gives the reader a feeling of how being at sea for prolonged periods of time drives sailors mad and into a moral decay.
Lastly, Melville ties it all together in the last portion of the chapter when he portrays Ishmael’s madness when he takes the helm late at night, and almost capsizes the whole ship. When he is at the helm, he notices the “redness, the madness, [and] the ghastliness of others” (313). This highlights how the entire ship is going mad, including the ship itself. When he describes the “ghastliness” of others, he means that the ship as a whole has transformed into hell, and the crew are fearful and manic. When Ishmael begins to fall asleep at the helm, he makes a fatal mistake of turning around. When he wakes up, he feels disoriented and is confused about what is going on, because all he saw in front of him was “a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness” (313). He then realizes after having a “bewildering feeling [of] death” come over him that he is turned around and fixes the tiller before the ship’s stern was fronted.
Ishmael feels a deep sense of relief and goes on to give a philosophical warning to all sailors who come after him, “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the
