Self-Destructiveness
The narrator describes the central event of the poem (the ship running into the iceberg) in terms of madness and intent. The collision between ship and ice is the result not of an obvious mistake like lack of vision, but as if the steering was done purposely. This thematic perspective transforms the events of the narrative into a thematic examination of how people do things that are doomed to failure or disaster with an intent or purpose that can seem like madness to the outsider.
Nature's Disinterest
“The Berg” is another entry in the catalog of disillusionment with the conventional Transcendentalist view of nature as benign and beautiful. Though not directly malevolent in terms of causing the sinking of the ship, the iceberg stands alongside Moby-Dick as another preternaturally white force of evil that marks the natural world as something for more sinister than it appears in the works of peers like Hawthorne, Whitman and Emerson. The second stanza is a laundry list of the damage that was not done to the iceberg along with mention of various other animals that did not engage in the madness of testing the stolidity of the iceberg which barely registered the tragedy of the ship sinking. Nature does not care about man is the message of this section of the stanza. The final stanza cements the fact of this indifference to man's suffering.
Resignation
A deep strain of pessimism runs throughout the works of Herman Melville, but many of these works take this them to the next level with their suggestion that the only proper response is resignation. Moby-Dick was famously described as an “evil book” by its author in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Critics have ever since tried to parse from this phrase what Melville thought was “evil.” Some have forwarded that Melville viewed his own sense of resignation to pessimistic perspectives as evil and that opinion is certainly confirmed by “The Berg.” Consider that the tragedy of a ship sinking seems to be caused a tendency toward self-destruction among humans and that the rest of the entire world reveals a comprehensive indifference to this tragedy. Now add Melville’s narrator to this mix: he does not spend an entire stanza marking off all the ways in which the ship was damaged, but rather all the ways in which the iceberg was not damaged. The ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor in verse delineated with the exact same indifference as that show by the ice and the animals around it. The message seems to be that man should resign itself to the consequences of its own self-destructive drives without expectations of pity. From the perspective of a universe obsessed with morality, that does seem to fulfill the definition of evil.
