Moby Dick Herman Melville

Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, attacks the views of the Transcendentalists by portraying Moby Dick, the white whale, as the personification of evil. This completely opposes the Transcendentalist idea that there is only good in the...

Among the numerous themes and ideas that author Herman Melville expresses in Moby Dick, one of the less examined is the superiority of the primitive man to the modern man. As an undertone running through the entire book, one can see in Moby Dick...

In Fay Weldon's opinion, a good writer does not always need to conclude his story with a joyous flourish in order to satisfy his reader. "The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer...

With his novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville uses the voyages of a New England whaler as a metaphor for the expansionist society in which he was living. Completed in 1851, the novel condemns America's values during the middle of the 19th century....

Captain Ahab, the fifty-eight year old commander of the Pequod, is one of the most fascinating mortals in literary history. The reader witnesses him teetering between sanity and madness, with the latter winning each slight battle and eventually...

In studying the development of the early American novel, one might find it helpful to compare Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg in "Moby Dick" to Huck's relationship with Jim in "Huckleberry Finn". In each case, the "savage" actually humanizes...

Melville's Political Thought in Moby-Dick

Herman Melville was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Because Rousseau died in 1778, 41 years prior to Melville's birth, Melville had access to all of Rousseau's writings....

Moby Dick is widely considered one of the greatest literary creations in history. The denseness of meaning, infinite possibility of interpretation, and ambiguity of implications give the text many layers. Therefore, knowing that the...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's optimistic ideal of the “self-reliant man” in nature resonated in the literature of many of his contemporaries. Although many agreed with Emerson's principles, however, two major writers, Herman Melville and John Keats, chose...

The white whale at the center of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick is often considered to be one of the most symbolic characters in American literature. In part, this is because not only can the white whale mean many different things to each...

Chapter 33 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, titled “The Specksynder,” is another of those non-narrative interstitial chapters that serves to give fits to many first-time readers, but that, like the others, contains within it a symbolic and...

Moby Dick ends with the unexpected death of everyone on the ship but Ishmael. Throughout the novel, the ship and its mates serve as a microcosm of the society for Melville to critique. Each character represents certain qualities and ideals that...

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea!

This soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:

So lonely 'twas, that God himself

Scarce seemed there to be.”

-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

On the surface, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick suggests...

When Herman Melville began writing Moby-Dick, he felt constrained by his financial obligations. In a letter to his close friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville proclaims that “Dollars damn me” and clarifies, “What I feel most moved...

In Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, the struggle between the Romantic, religious, and at times over-emotional intent of characters and their reasonable nature creates the complexities faced on the Pequod, the ship captained by Ahab. This competition...

Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, is filled with symbolism and messages that relate to human behavior and the effects of that on the world. This is shown in Chapter 87 ‘The Grand Armada,’ which takes place while the Pequod is traveling through straits....

When you meet someone new, perhaps the best thing to do is not to “judge a book by its cover,” but is not doing so that a possibility in the world we live in? Not only relevant to today, judgment based on physical attributes traces back to the...

Throughout Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the character of Queequeg, the New Zealander harpooner, is presented by Melville as possibly the most heroic and honestly good natured of the crew of the novels main setting, the whaling ship Pequod. He...

Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick is well knows for the epic sea voyage that takes place over the course of the text. However, this journey doubles as not only a physical journey of movement from place to place but also a spiritual one. Ishmael’s...

The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Moby Dick by Herman Melville feature two uniquely different characters who similarly strive for fulfillment amidst uncertainty and danger, completely devoid of moral qualms about extremities taken...

Friends are often expected to be brutally honest and tell others that what they are doing is wrong, from shoplifting to dating an abusive person. These are the duties of a friend in modern society, but the same conception of friendship as...

Throughout history, America has often been depicted as a land of many freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of petition, thanks to the First Amendment. Slowly but surely, these...

There are two sides to everything, whether it be a situation, decision, or even a person, perspective is important when evaluating the positives and negatives of anything. For instance, on an extremely hot day the sun is viewed as a negative...

Many deities are invoked and discussed throughout Moby-Dick. Yet, despite some vivid allusions to Gnostic theology, the overall impact of these allusions generally go unnoticed. However, understanding how Gnostic theology is explored in the novel...