“Cain’s Ring”

This chapter examines the juxtaposition of war and sacrifice in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Melville has been often identified as a forerunner of later anti-war writers—as an artist engaged from early on in his literary career in denouncing the destruction unleashed on the world by “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth”: “white, civilized man.” Moby-Dick casts serious doubts regarding the possibility of curbing a violence that keeps frustrating mankind's best hopes from time immemorial. This chapter first considers Father Mapple's sermon and the concept of monstrous double in Moby-Dick, along with the logic of primal sacrifice and the link between sacrifice and survival in the text. It then explores how, in Melville's world, resistance to violence seems to entail further violence, in an endless, tragic cycle of aggressions and counteraggressions, as well as the cultural and narrative logic behind the paradox that no one can be entirely innocent and yet felt spotless as the lamb.