But Faith, Like a Jackal, Feeds Among the Tombs

Sure, Melville is among the greats, but we don't have to worship at his feet, which were as clay as yours or mine. Still, in Moby-Dick, you're often left to wonder if even the perceived mistakes or weaknesses aren't as intentional as a flaw in a Shaker chair. Consider, for example, the following passage:

[H]ow it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

So, I frankly ask you, reader, Do you buy this passage? Cause I'm not sure I do. How does  the author of "faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs" wind up writing, a short paragraph later, "My body is just the lees of my better self"?

Is he saying that the rest of the world is secretly hypocritical about their faith in the soul but he, our everyman Ishmael, is not? Or is all this "methinks-my-body" stuff just the same sense of it's-unthinkable-that-I-could-disappear that so much of the rest of humanity shares?

If this were another author, I'd say something stinks in in the Whaleman's chapel and I'd point to this unsettled and unsettling theological stew of soul and sole. We crave better, purer fare than this, especially once cruise ship Pequod sails.

But this is Melville, after all, so we've got to wonder if this muddled thinking isn't intentional paradox. Does our boy Ishmael also gather faith here amid the tombs - so much faith, in fact, that he boldly states that Jove - or does me mean Jehovah - cannot "stave" his own soul? It rings of more than faith - of an almost Ahab-like hubris. So, what do you think: Is this passage an unwholesome mess, a perfect circular paradox, or a masterful bit of foreshadowing?