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This essay aims to reach a more comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of the extent to which Melville interrogates the fundamental principles of Western metaphysics through a close examination of Ahab’s view of incarnation and his egoism. Although critics have tirelessly examined Melville’s personal involvement with a set of religious and philosophical ideas, not many critics have considered Ahab’s rebellious thoughts on Christianity along with his questioning of Platonism, and more importantly, none of the critics has fully addressed the issue of Ahab’s egoism in this context. Ahab’s view of incarnation is important in understanding Melville’s revision of both Platonism and orthodox Christianity because in both branches of metaphysics, the relationship between corporeal reality and spiritual reality prescribes the notion of good and evil as well as that of subject and object. Ahab’s rejection of both platonic and Christian premises amounts to the rejection of any religious tradition or philosophical system that holds that all knowledge can be reduced to an absolute unified theory. In the absence of any metaphysics which endorses universal truth, how to overcome the confines of subjective perspectives and perception becomes the most crucial and ultimate question to confront, which is why Ahab’s egoism occupies a central position in Melville’s exploration of a positive alternative to Christianity or Platonism. The complex nature of Ahab’s egoism can be best illuminated by examining Melville’s alteration of Narcissus of the Greek mythology whose name symbolizes extreme self-admiration and vanity into a Narcissus who dives to uncover the truth about himself even at the risk of being drowned.
