Herman Melville

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Herman Melville

• Moby-Dick

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Herman Melville

• Born 1 August 1819
• Birthplace New York, New York
• Died 28 September 1891 (heart failure)
• Best Known As The author of Moby-Dick

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Herman Melville

• Born to a wealthy New York family that suffered
  great financial losses, Melville had little
  formal schooling and began a period of wanderings
  at sea in 1839. In 1841 he sailed on a whaler
  bound for the South Seas the next year he jumped
  ship in the Marquesas Islands.

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Herman Melville

• His adventures in Polynesia were the basis of his
  successful first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo
  (1847). After his allegorical fantasy Mardi
  (1849) failed, he quickly wrote Redburn (1849)
  and White-Jacket (1850), about the rough life of
  sailors.

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Herman Melville

• Moby-Dick (1851), his masterpiece, is both an
  intense whaling narrative and a symbolic
  examination of the problems and possibilities of
  American democracy it brought him neither
  acclaim nor reward when published. Increasingly
  reclusive and despairing, he wrote Pierre (1852),
  which, intended as a piece of domestic "ladies"
  fiction, became a parody of that popular genre,
  Israel Potter (1855), The Confidence-Man (1857),
  and magazine stories, including "Bartleby the
  Scrivener" (1853) and "Benito Cereno" (1855).

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Herman Melville

• After 1857 he wrote verse. In 1866 a
  customs-inspector position finally brought him a
  secure income. He returned to prose for his last
  work, the novel Billy Budd, Foretopman, which
  remained unpublished until 1924. Neglected for
  much of his career, Melville came to be regarded
  by modern critics as one of the greatest American
  writers.

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Major works

• Typee A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)Omoo A
  Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
• Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851)
• Mardi And a Voyage Thither (1849)
• White-Jacket or, The World in a Man-of-War
  (1850)
• Bartleby the Scrivener A Story of Wall Street
  (1853)
• Billy Budd (1924)

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Moby-Dick

• Moby Dick is a novel of epic proportions with
  characteristics of Greek and Elizabethan stage
  tragedies. Melville completed the book at
  Arrowhead, Mass., where he lived for a while.
  Moby Dick is arguably the greatest sea novel ever
  written. Some critics also maintain that is the
  greatest American novel ever written.

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Moby-Dick

• Moby Dick was published in October 1851 in London
  by Richard Bentley and November 1851 in New York
  by Harper Brothers. Melville dedicated the
  novel to fellow American author Nathaniel
  Hawthorne. 
• 1) a very philosophical metaphysical novel2) a
  story of revenge3) a Shakespearean tragedy

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Moby-Dick

• 1. Settings 
• The action early in the novel takes place in New
  Bedford and Nantucket, Mass. Later, the action
  takes place at sea on the Pequod, a
  weather-beaten ship, and on whaling boats sent
  out from the Pequod. The novel ends when the
  whale destroys the Pequod and another ship, the
  Rachel picks up Ishmael, who survived by floating
  on a coffin.

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Moby-Dick

• 2. Major characters 
• Protagonist Ahab --- Captain of the
  Pequod  Antagonist Moby-Dick --- the Whale,
  symbolizing the forces working against Ahab 
  Ishmael Pequod seaman and narrator of the
  action  

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Moby-Dick

• 3. Plot summary
• Moby-Dick is the enormous white whale who
  torments Captain Ahab in the novel Moby-Dick
  (1851). Ahab is obsessed with finding and killing
  Moby-Dick, having lost a leg in a previous
  encounter with the whale, and Ahab's burning
  desire for revenge really is the center of the
  story. At novel's end, Ahab finds and attacks
  Moby-Dick, but the terrible whale takes Ahab, his
  ship Pequod, and nearly all its crew down to a
  watery grave with him. Melville based his tale,
  in part, on the sinking of the real-life whaling
  ship Essex in 1820.

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Moby-Dick

• The first mate Starbuck in Moby-Dick was the
  inspiration for the name of the Starbucks coffee
  chain... The musician Moby is a descendant of
  Melville -- hence his wry nickname... Moby-Dick's
  first line is famously short "Call me Ishmael."
  Ishmael is the book's narrator and the only
  survivor of the Pequod's encounter with Moby-Dick.

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Moby-Dick

• 4. CharacterizationIshmaelan outcast to look
  for truththe only intelligentthe only one to
  have a belief in humanitythe only
  survivor---the way of Ishmael, the way of life
  

• Ahab the captain of the whaling ship, Pequoda
  Greek or Shakespearean heroa devil, with a
  strong desire for revenge---the way of Ahab, the
  way of death

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Moby-Dick

• 5. Symbolism
• Pequod --- inevitable death
• The voyage --- the search for the ultimate
  truth
• Moby Dick---Nature---evil / evil force
  ---human destiny---American capitalism

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Moby-Dick

• 6. Major themes 
• 1) Man cannot penetrate to the heart of the great
  power, the primal (???, ???) force, that controls
  the world and appears to manipulate the destinies
  of its inhabitants. Moby Dick represents this
  inscrutable, mysterious powerGod to some Satan,
  Fate, or another force to others. Ahab and other
  seamen may harpoon the whale, but they cannot
  harvest it.

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Moby-Dick

• In attempting to kill the great whale, Ahab is
  like Adam attempting to harvest unrevealed
  knowledge by eating the apple in the Garden of
  Eden. Ahab has also been compared to the Greek
  god Prometheus, who defied Zeus by stealing fire
  from heaven and giving it to man.

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Moby-Dick

• 2) The whiteness of Moby Dick
• White produces all the colors of the spectrum
  when it passes through a prism, suggesting that
  Moby Dick embodies all the subtle huesin their
  millions of variationsof knowledge. How can a
  man hope to separate and process these hues?
  Ishmael reflects this theme in his frequent
  narrative digressions that define and describe
  whales.

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Moby-Dick

• Though these digressions are long and exhaustive,
  full of technical detail, they never completely
  capture the nature of the whale and its meaning
  to, and impact on, human beings. The whiteness
  also suggests doom, as did the albatross, a white
  bird, in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  

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Moby-Dick

• 3) Pequod as Microcosm  In literature a
  microcosm is a small worlda family, a workplace,
  a town, a schoolwith people of varying
  personalities and backgrounds, like the world at
  large. The Pequod is a microcosm, for its crew is
  made up of blacks and whites, heathens and
  Christians, the weak and the strong, the humble
  and the proud, the cowardly and the courageous.
  Melville apply the qualities and characteristics
  of the crew of this small worldbigotry, piety,
  greed, tolerance, and so onto the world in
  general.  

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Moby-Dick

• 4) Noble Savages a major literary motif  since
  ancient times, writers have often depicted
  aboriginal or uncivilized people as
  nobleuntainted by the corrupt ways of
  civilization. Greek and Latin authors, such as
  Homer and Ovid, were sympathetic to some
  primitive peoples in their writings. In 1672, the
  English poet, critic and dramatist John Dryden
  coined the term noble savage in a play called The
  Conquest of Granada.

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Moby-Dick

• Between 1760 and 1780, the French writer and
  philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau popularized the
  concept of the noble savage in his writings. In
  Moby Dick, Melville developed this motif with
  three noble savages the harpooners Queequeg,
  Tashtego, and Daggoo. For example, he depicts
  Queequega tattooed (???, ??) savage who sells
  shrunken headsas being more tolerant and
  benevolent than the civilized Christian
  whalers.  

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