Moby Dick

•பைடு நூலகம்
In this work Melville shows that Man in this universe lives a meaningless and futile life, meaningless because futile. Man can observe and even manipulate in a prudent way, but he cannot influence and overcome nature at its source. He must ultimately, place himself at the mercy of nature. Once he attempts to seek power over it he is doomed. It show us the “the absurdity of man’s attempts to attribute meaning and value to a world in which these can have no ground or status.”（the main reason for Melville’s resurrection in the present century.）
Plot
• Ishmael, feeling depressed, seeks escape by going out to sea on the whaling ship, Pequod. The captain is Ahab, the man with one leg. Moby Dick, the white whale, had sheared off his leg on a previous voyage, and Ahab resolves to hunt him to the kill. He hangs a doubloon (西班牙金币) on the mast as are ward for anyone who sights the whale first. The Pequod makes a good catch of whales but Ahab refuses to turn back until he has killed his enemy.
Character list
• Ahab - The egomaniacal (极端利己的) captain of the Pequod. Ahab lost his leg to Moby Dick. He is singleminded in his pursuit of the whale, using a mixture of charisma (教皇般的感召力) and terror to persuade his crew to join him. As a captain, he is dictatorial but not unfair. At moments he shows a compassionate side, caring for the insane Pip and musing on his wife and child back in Nantucket. • He seeks to dominate nature, impose his will on the outside world, to assert man’s supremacy over a superior power. In a sense, Ahab is a hero who is trying to assert men’s place in nature.
• Ishmael - The narrator, and a junior member of the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael doesn't play a major role in the events of the novel, but much of the narrative is taken up by his eloquent, verbose (详细的), and extravagant discourse on whales and whaling.

Themes
1. Conflict between man and nature: It is first a Shakespearean tragedy of man fighting against overwhelming odds in an indifferent and even hostile universe. Nature has overwhelming power. Man can’t conquer nature. Man, living in this world, is a tragedy. The idea that man make the world for himself is nothing but a Transcendentalist folly. 2. Criticism against Emersonian self-reliant individual: negative reflection of self-reliance, individualism. Ahab is too much of a self-reliant individual to be a good human being. He stands alone on his own one leg among the millions of the peopled earth. For him the only law is his own will. To him the world exists for his own sake. His selfhood must be asserted at the expense of all else. 3. Rejection and Quest: Ishmael resembles his namesake in the Bible in that he is a wanderer. Tired with and rejecting his early lifestyle, he tried to seek for a happy and ideal life. He gradually comes to see the folly of Ahab seeking to conquer nature and begins to feel the significance of love and fraternity among mortal beings. Voyaging for Ishmael has become a journey in quest of knowledge and values.
• Then, it can be understood as a bitter satire on Transcendentalism’s emphasis on self-reliance. Captain Ahab believed in his own power (a human being’s power) too much and thus he doomed to fail, because human’s power is limited and there is a mysterious thing existed in the universe which controlled man’s life and cannot be understood by human being. • Nowadays some new research indicated that the story means man should protect the nature otherwise man will be punished as those whalers in the story were punished by the whale.
Moby Dick
Moby Dick
An encyclopedia of everything, history, philosophy, religion, etc. in addition to a detailed account of the operations of the whaling industry.
Moby Dick - The great white sperm whale. also referred to as the White Whale, is an infamous and dangerous threat to seamen, considered by Ahab the incarnation of evil and a fated nemesis (报应).
• Eventually the white whale appears, and the Pequod begins its doomed fight with it. On the first day the whale overturns a boat; on the second it swamps another. When the third day comes, Ahab and his crew manage to plunge a harpoon into it, but the whale carries the Pequod along with it to its doom. All on board the whaler get drowned, except one, Ishmael, who survives to tell the tale.
Technique -- Ambiguity