“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 8): Ahab says to Pip, “Like cures like,” which means that Ahab, like Pip, has multiple personality

The two people on the whaling ship who appear to be most unlike each other are Captain Ahab and Pip, “a little negro lad, five feet high” (1, chapter 129, p. 705). But they have something in common.

Ahab says, “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt [of Moby-Dick], my malady [my Moby-Dick monomaniac personality] becomes my most desired health…

After Ahab leaves the ship’s cabin, Pip says, “Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing…Who’s seen Pip?” (1, pp. 703-704).

The reader was previously told the nature of Pip’s mental malady in chapter 125, when Pip said, “Pip? Whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Let’s see if ye haven’t fished him up…” (1, p. 689). Ever since he’d been scared in that boating accident, Pip had switched to an unnamed alternate personality.

So when Ahab says to Pip, “like cures like,” it means that he, too, has multiple personality.

The mental malady that Ahab and Pip share is not labeled “multiple personality,” so I don’t know whether Melville thought of it in those terms. But however he thought of it, he returned to that subject in his last novel, The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in my first post on Melville.

Did Melville see himself as having multiple personality? And did he see his “malady” as being “my most desired health” for writing novels?

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