“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 7): Are Ahab’s “five phantoms” his alternate personalities, and thus all part of one man?

Suddenly, the crew sees that Captain Ahab is “surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air” (1, chapter 47, p. 305).

The leader of the five phantoms is Fedallah, and after some time has passed, it evolves “that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew, but one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as…people…only see in their dreams, and that but dimly…” (1, chapter 50, pp. 324-325).

Later in the voyage, after Ahab and his five-phantom, personal boat crew kill a whale, he talks with Fedallah (aka Parsee) about his recurrent dream. Ahab insists it means that he will “slay Moby-Dick and survive it,” but Fedallah, cryptically, seems to disagree.

At the end of their conversation, “Both were silent again, as one man” (1, chapter 117, p. 662).

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick or The Whale [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.