What Is Queequeg's Role In Achieving The American Dream

Herman Melville was born in New York City to a financially stable family. He was receiving a good education up until age 13 when his father died, stripping the family of all financial support, and leaving his eight children half orphans. Hennig Cohen, a professor of English at University of Pennsylvania, commented, “For young Melville his father's death brought an end to what seems, outwardly at least, to have been a stable and unremarkable childhood.” (n.p.) From there on, Melville began a journey, following his own American Dream in a variety of ways. Specifically in Moby Dick, Herman Melville uses each character to portray different socio-economic backgrounds to compare how they go about achieving the American Dream, presented by Melville
Queequeg comes as a mixture of all past and contemporary worlds. Ishmael’s developing relationship with Queequeg is also symbolic of his fear of death; first, he is afraid of it, it is unknown and foreign to him but after one night, he wakes to a mutual embrace. He accepted the concept and bonded with it, no longer chaining himself to a fearful and harmless life. More importantly, Queequeg is an integral part of the crew along the journey, as he becomes one of the best and fearless harpooners. Consequently, not only is Queequeg a common part of every journey, because of the narrator’s relationship with him represented as fearlessness of death, and by extension failure, his presence is symbolic of strength to whoever is making a journey towards their American
Among all men in Spouter Inn, and upon the ship, Queequeg is the only one of his complexion, covered in quilt like, mysterious tattoos. A Professor of English, Owen Elmore, explores the effect of this isolation:
“In Moby-Dick, Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg is a… representation of Melville's integration with the society… The deepest significance of this relationship can be shown through a closer examination of Moby-Dick's unified central theme… of a mysterious, yet complexly unified universe; from animal to action, the ambiguous and ambivalent nature of Nature is always pervasive, making it possible to view even small pieces of the book to get to its stereoptic whole” (n.p.)
By presenting Queequeg as a piece of nature isolated from the ‘developed’ human society, Melville provides insight as to how influences from outside cultures viewed as ‘savage’ by the more developed cultures can shape our experiences. The different system of hierarchy from which Queequeg originates, leads to another Dream: one with a different system of integration, where the commonly accepted values of the American Dream hold no importance. These social outliers provide a refreshment on our seemingly single-minded way of life: possibilities of journeys with the same worth, but a different outcome. Dreams that hold a more natural progression depicted as holy or god-like by Melville because of an apparent inability to understand