Department or Program

English

Abstract

To read Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick through the lens of Law and Literature is to recognize it as a prolonged jurisdictional dispute. While critics traditionally view the Pequod as a symbol of democratic will or cosmic fate, this thesis examines the vessel as a rigid legal structure. The ship is a workplace defined by the binding “lay” and the constraints of maritime code. I argue that Captain Ahab stages a juridical coup, shifting the ship from an “island of law” into a “state of exception.” By weaponizing the industrial routines of the “floating factory,” Captain Ahab displaces the commercial contract with a private, sacrificial nomos. Through his regime of surveillance that is as practical as it is ideological, he reorganizes the crew into instruments of private vengeance, effectively severing the ship from the law of nations and stripping its sailors of meaningful legal recourse.

I contend that the novel’s catastrophic ending functions as a procedural verdict: a form of violence necessary to dismantle an illegitimate polity. The vortex does more than swallow a ship. It contains and extinguishes a legal contagion. Ishmael’s survival, consequently, is structural rather than moral. He endures as a necessary recorder of institutional collapse. Clinging to the coffin-archive, he preserves the case file of a sovereignty that could only be undone by its own erasure. Where law proves unable to check the demagogue, the narrative itself intervenes to render judgment.

Level of Access

Open Access

First Advisor

Osucha, Eden

Date of Graduation

5-2026

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Number of Pages

97

Components of Thesis

1 pdf file

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