Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a work that depicts in great detail the silence of God when faced with human suffering and the indifference of the universe. The authors of this article try to show how the book is a reflection of the loss of traditional religious comfort, where the silence of the deity is contrasted with the continuous sound of the sea - a power that is both beautiful and frightening. Captain Ahab’s rejection of God, Ishmael’s philosophical thoughts, and the crew’s tragedy are like Melville’s existential struggle with meaning, morality, and metaphysical order. The sea metaphorically becomes the character that speaks while God is silent and this situation represents the 19th-century world that has a faith crisis because of scientific progress and theological suspicion. Using close reading and theological and philosophical concepts that are mainly based on Calvinism, Romanticism, and proto-existentialism this work says that Moby-Dick is not a story about the divine justice, but it is rather a witness of the lack of religious certainty in the disorderly universe. Melville’s literary theology does not give a clear solution, it only offers a scary perception of a universe where the human being’s search for meaning is both glorious and fated. This paper rightfully regards Moby-Dick as a very important book in the literary history of spiritual disillusionment and metaphysical questioning
Myasar Ammar Kamil (Mon,) studied this question.