Transcript Moby Dick

III.4.Herman Melville
(1819-1891)
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Focus of Study
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Life Experience
Literary Career
Major works
Point of View
Writing Style
Significance
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Life Experience
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Herman Melville was born in
New York City into an
established merchant family.
The death of his father
(Primary school education)
In 1837, as a cabin boy on a
merchant ship for Liverpool.
He shipped out in 1839 and
1841 on Acushnet to the
Atlantic and the South Seas.
He later said, “A whale ship
was my Harvard and Yale."
Literary Career
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He returned in 1844 to his mother's house and
spent the rest of his life writing.
He married in 1847 and in 1850 he became the
friend of Hawthorne who exerts great influence
on his writing and his philosophical attitudes.
As masterpiece, Moby Dick was a commercial
and critical failure in its author's time.
Melville endured immense family strife and
tragedy, including the deaths of two sons. His
death on September 28, 1891, prompted little
notice.
Redburn, His First Voyage
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Typee (1846)
Ommo (1847)
Redburn ( 1849 )
Moby Dick (1851)
The Confidence
Man (1857)
Billy Budd (1924)
Major works
Typee: A Peep at
Polynesian Life
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Typee, an account
of his stay with the
cannibals.
OMOO
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OMOO, the sequel
of Typee, and
gained a huge
success as the first
novel.
Billy Budd (1924)
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1.
2.
The story is set in 1797 during
the war between England and
France.
Billy Budd: a foretopman
John Claggart：Master-at-Arms
Edward Fairfax Vere: Captain
Theme:
whether law is maintained on the
basis of moral justice.
Man in dilemma.
Focus Study on Moby Dick
1. Plot Study
2. Thematic Concern:
a. Whaling as a metaphor for
life
b. Alienation VS Friendship
c. Man's search for
knowledge and for control
over Nature
d. The nature of the Universe
both as friendly and
unfriendly; different and
unconquerable.
3. Character Analysis
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Ahab: a portrait of an
Emersonian self-reliant
individual, the type of
self-absorption which
leads to isolation,
madness, and suicide. He
resembles his monstrous
enemy Moby Dick. He
hates the mysterious and
hostile force of nature. He
challenges it with all
might and main. The
novel shows both his
greatness and folly.
Ishmael: a wanderer and outcast, is
roving to find his spiritual home.
He represents general humanity
for his sympathy with all human
possibilities and actions. He
shows no respect for conventions
and authorities, and he is a
believer of the insights in the
secrets of human life and man's
dignity. He learns life, love and
brotherhood from association with
Queequeg, the Polynesian savage
in the novel.
symbolic meanings
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Pequod: a miniature society by individualizing a
train of characters. (an extinct Indian tribe)
Moby Dick: paradoxically benign and malevolent,
nourishing and destructive; massive, brutal,
monolithic, but at the same time protean, erotically
beautiful, infinitely variable. It represents the final
mystery of the universe which man will do well to
desist from pursuing.
Its whiteness: also a paradoxical color, signifying
as it does death and corruption as well as purity,
innocence, and youth.
Point of View
1. His novels, wide-ranging in content, are both
realistic accounts of his experience at sea and
allegorical presentations of the man's unceasing
quest in a world of perplexity and boredom.
2. Two strains dominate in American literature
beginning from 1836: optimistic and pessimistic.
Melville's view of life is that of tragedy. He
commits himself to a pessimistic, morbid and
devilish view that dominates the world.
3. His frequent themes are the tensions between
innocence and experience, good and evil, noblesavage and civilization, authority and rebellion,
isolation and sociality, morality and law, etc.
4. His novels and tales are always open-ended with
a moral uncertainty left for his reader.
He was a noble and lost quester, as Hawthorne
once said, a man who could “neither believe nor
be comfortable in his unbelief and a man who was
of very high and noble nature, and better
immortality than most of us.”
Writing Style
1. His writing is
consciously literary. His
rich rhythmical prose
and poetic power show
his high craftsmanship.
His grammatical
structure is radically
complex and long, but
full of poetic rhythms.
2. His style is highly
symbolic and
metaphorical.
3. There is a threefold quality in his writing: the
style of fact, the style of oratory celebrating
the fact, and the style of meditation.
4. Moby Dick has many non-narrative
chapters, this is how Melville changed an
adventure story into a philosophical novel.
The maritime jargon which gives his novels a
flavor of the sea.
5. He used the technique of multiple views to
achieve the effect of ambiguity.
Significance
The rediscovery and reexamination of the writer
in 20th century:
1. Freudian psychology became very popular and
Melville's work was easy to analyze according to
Freudian principles.
2. The writers of the 1920s were trying to achieve
the breadth, penetration, symbolic richness,
irony, and vicious satire in Melville’s works in
their own literature.
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3. His themes of alienation, loneliness, suicidal
individualism, confrontation of innocence and
evil, morbidity and demonism of the world,
agonies of self-discovery, mistrust of the idea
of unrestrained liberty, man as radically
imperfect and a world filled with lost
innocence and betrayed hope, etc. became the
focus of people’s attention.
4. The loss of faith and the sense of futility and
meaninglessness, which characterized
modern life of the West, were already
expressed in his work.
5. His reputation rests on his rich, poetic prose,
on his philosophy, and on his effective use of
symbolism.
Students Activities: Discussion Class
Suggested Essay Topics:
1. Why does the novel's narrator
begin his story with "Call me
Ishmael"? What would the
narrative have been like if
Ahab were the narrator?
2.How does Ishmael's
relationship to Queequeg
change from the time they
meet to the sailing of the
Pequod?
3. Why does Ahab pursue Moby
Dick so single-mindedly?
4. Why does Starbuck decide against killing Ahab,
despite believing that it is the only way to "survive
to hug his wife and child again"? (p. 559) Why
does Starbuck fail to convince Ahab to give up his
pursuit of Moby Dick?
5. Why does Ishmael digress from his story to
meditate on the meaning of whiteness ("The
Whiteness of the Whale")?
6. Why does the coffin prepared for Queequeg
become Ishmael's life buoy as Pequod sinks?
7. Who or what is primarily responsible for the
destruction of the Pequod and her crew?
8. How has his experience aboard the Pequod
affected Ishmael?
For Further
Reflection
1. On what basis should
we determine the
point at which
ambition turns into
obsession?
2. Is knowledge always
at least partly
harmful, either in its
application or the
cost of acquiring it?
References
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Reading of 'Moby-Dick' by Milton Oswin
Percival (1950)
New Perspectives on Melville, ed. by
Faith Pullin (1978)
Melville by Edward H. Rosenberry (1979)
Herman Melville, ed. by A. Robert Lee
(1984)
Empire for Liberty: Melville and the
Poetics of Individualism by Wai-chee
Dimock (1991)
Thank
You Very Much for
Attending This Lecture