Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by 1851 by American author Herman Melville. The book is the story of Ismael's sailor about the obsessive quest of Ahab, the captain of the whaling vessel Pequod, to take revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale on the cruise before bite Ahab's leg on the knee. Contribute to American Renaissance literature, the classification of the genre of works ranges from the Romantic Symbol to the beginning. Moby-Dick was published for a variety of reviews, a commercial failure, and was not printed at the time of the author's death in 1891. His reputation as "The Great American Novel" was founded only in the 20th Century, after a hundred years of birth the author. William Faulkner admits he hopes he has written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence calls it "one of the weirdest and most beautiful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". The opening sentence, "Call me Ismael", is one of the world's most famous literature.
Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850, and in the end it would take 18 months to write the book, a full year more than previously anticipated. Writing was interrupted by him making Nathaniel Hawthorne's acquaintance in August 1850, and with the creation of the "Mosses from Old Manse" essay as the first result of that friendship. This book is dedicated to Hawthorne, "as a sign of my admiration for his genius".
The basis of this work is the 1841 Melville Whale voyage aboard Acushnet. The novel also uses literature on whaling, and literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The white whale modeled on the famous Macchino Dick whale is difficult to catch, and the end of the book is based on the sinking of the Essex aircraft carrier in 1820. A detailed and realistic description of whale hunting and from extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard among culturally diverse crews, mixed with class exploration and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God. In addition to the narrative prose, Melville uses literary styles and tools ranging from songs, poems, and catalogs to Shakespeare, soliloquy, and other stages.
In October 1851, the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" was published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. In the same month, the entire book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London, and under its definitive title in the one-volume edition of New York in November. There are hundreds of differences between two editions, at least but some important and enlightening. London publisher, Richard Bentley, censor or alter the sensitive parts; Melville made revisions as well, including last-minute changes to titles for the New York edition. The pope, however, appears in the second text of the edition as "Moby Dick", without hyphens. One of the factors that made British reviewers scoff at the book is that it seems to be told by a narrator who died on a ship: the English edition does not have an Epilogue, which tells the life of Ishmael. About 3,200 copies sold during the author's life.
Video Moby-Dick
Plot
Ishmael traveled in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford with plans to register for the whale's journey. The inn where he arrived was too full, so he had to share his bed with a tattooed Polynesian Antagonist, a harpooneer whose father was the king of the fictional island of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ismael and Queequeg attended Father Mapple's lecture on Jonah, then headed for Nantucket. Ishmael signed up with the Quaker Bildad and Peleg ship owners to travel on their whalers Pequod . Peleg describes Captain Ahab: "He is a great, godless, god-like" who remains "in humanity". They rented Queequeg the next morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a terrible fate if Ishmael and Queequeg joined Ahab. While the provisions are loaded, the shadow figure goes up to the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, Pequod left the harbor.
Ishmael discusses cetology (zoological classification and natural history of whales), and describes crew members. The main couple are 30-year-old Starbuck, a Quart Nantucket with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; the second couple is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head, and the third couple is Flask, also from Martha's Vineyard, short, plump, the Harpooneer is Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident of Nantucket.
When Ahab finally appears in the quarterdeck, he announces him out to take revenge on a white whale that takes one leg from the knee down and leaves it with a prosthesis made from the jawbone of the whale. Ahab will give the first person to see Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin, which he nails into the pole. The Starbuck thing that he did not come for revenge but for profit. Ahab's aim was to train the mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's outrageous feud seems to be mine". Instead of flooding the Cape Horn, Ahab headed for the equatorial Pacific Ocean through southern Africa. One afternoon, when Ismael and Queequeg were weaving a mat - "the weft is necessary, his hands free will, and the chance of the sword Queequeg" - Tashtego looked at the sperm whale. Five unknown men appeared on the deck and were revealed to be a special crew chosen by Ahab. Their leader, Fedallah, a Parsee, is an Ahab harpooneer. The chase did not work.
South East Cape of Good Hope, Pequod made the first of nine sea meetings, or "gams," with another ship: Ahab summoned Goney Albatross to ask if they had seen the White Whale , but the trumpet that his captain used to speak fell into the sea before he could answer. Ishmael explained that because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sailed without the usual "gam", which defines it as "the social encounter of two (or more) whales", in which both captains remain on one ship and one headed fellow on the other. In the second gameplay of the Cape of Good Hope, with a Nantucket whale hunter, the hidden tale of "God's judgment" is revealed, but only to the crew: a challenging sailor who strikes an oppressive officer whipped, and when the officer was leading the chase for Moby Dick, he fell out of the boat and was killed by the pope.
Ishmael deviates from whales, brit (a microscopic sea creature where whales feed), squid and - after four boats descended in vain because Daggoo thinks giant squid for white whale - the whale's line. The next day, in the Indian Ocean, Stubb kills a sperm whale, and that night Fleece, the black cook Pequod prepares him a rare whale steak. Fleece gave a sermon to the sharks who fought each other for partying on the whale carcass, bound to the ship, saying that their nature should be greedy, but they must overcome it. Whale is prepared, decapitated, and an oil vat is tried. Standing at the head of the pope, Ahab begs him to talk about the depths of the sea. The next Pequod meets Jeroboam , which not only loses its main partner to Moby Dick, but is also now overwhelmed by the epidemic.
Whale carcasses still in the water. Queequeg boarded it, tied to Ishmael's belt with a monkey rope as if they were Siamese twins. Stubb and Flask kill the right whale whose head is tied to a tree across the head of a sperm whale. Ishmael compared the two heads in a philosophical way: the right whales are the Lockean, the stoic, and the sperm whales as the Kantean, platonic. Tashtego cut off the head of a sperm whale and picked up a bucket of oil. He falls to the head, and the head falls from the field to the sea. Queequeg dives thereafter and frees his friend with his sword.
The Pequod gams next with Jungfrau from Bremen. Both ships saw the whales simultaneously, with Pequod winning the contest. The three harpooneers pierced their spears, and Flask did a deadly strike with a spear. The carcasses drowned, and Queequeg almost managed to escape. The Pequod ' s next gam is with a French whaler Bouton de Rose , whose crew does not know about ambergris in their sick whale. Stubb talks about it, but Ahab orders him to leave. A few days later, a meeting with a blown whale asked Pip, a small black boy from Alabama, to jump out of his whale boat. The whale should be cut loose, because the line has a Pip so entangled in it. Angry, Stubb orders Pip to stay in a whale boat, but Pip then jumps again, and is left alone in the vast ocean and is crazy when he is picked up.
The remaining sperm oil is already cold and must be squeezed back into a liquid state; the fat is boiled in a test pan on the deck; warm oil is poured into the barrel, and then stored on the ship. After surgery, the deck is rubbed. Coins hammered into the main pole showing three Andes peaks, one with fire, one with a tower, and one rooster crowing. Ahab paused to look at doubloon and interpret the coins as a sign of his firmness, volcanic energy, and victory; Starbuck took the high peak as evidence of the Trinity; Stubb focuses on the zodiac arch on the mountain; and the Flask does not see any symbolic value at all. The Manxman murmured in front of the pole, and Pip refused the verb "look".
The Pequod is next with London's Samuel Enderby, captain by Boomer, a down-to-earth companion who lost his right arm to Moby Dick. However, he did not bring bad intentions against the pope, which he considered not evil, but awkward. Ahab ends the gam by rushing back to his ship. The narrator now discusses the subject of (1) whale inventory; (2) glen in Tranque on the islands of Arsacides full of carved bones, fossil whales, pope whale measurements; (3) the likelihood that the whale will be reduced and that the leviathan may be destroyed.
Leaving Samuel Enderby , Ahab nudged his ivory foot and ordered the carpenter to make it different. Starbuck informs Ahab about oil leaks in the hold. Reluctantly, Ahab ordered the harpooneers to inspect the barrels. Queequeg, sweating all day under the deck, developed a sense of cold and soon almost feverish. The carpenter makes a coffin for Queequeg, who is afraid of the usual burials at sea. Queequeg tries it for size, with Pip crying and hitting his tambourine, standing up and calling himself a coward while he praises Queequeg for his masculinity. However, Queequeg suddenly rallied, briefly recovered, and jumped, returning in good health. From that time on, he used the coffin for the reserve seachest, which was then caulking and pitched to replace the Pequod span buoy.
The Pequod sailed northeast into Formosa and into the Pacific Ocean. Ahab, with one nostril, smelled the musk from Bashee island, and with the others, the salt from the waters where Moby Dick swam. Ahab went to Perth, a blacksmith, with a bag of horses pony horses forged to the calf of a special lance, and with his razor for Perth to melt and become a harpoon squirrel. Ahab makes thorns in the blood of Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo.
The Pequod next gamers with Bachelor , a Nantucket ship to the house full of sperm oil. Occasionally, Pequod decreases to whales successfully. On one of those nights in the submarine, Fedallah prophesied that neither the hearse nor the coffin could belong to Ahab, that before he died, Ahab had to see two hearse - not made by mortal hands and the other made of American wood - that Fedallah will precede his captain in death, and finally only hemp can kill Ahab.
As Pequod approaches the Equator, Ahab scolds his quadrant for just saying where he is and not where he will be. He ran to the deck. That night, an impressive typhoon struck the ship. Lightning strikes grabbed the mast, set doubloon and harpun Ahab's voice. Ahab delivered a speech about the spirit of fire, seeing lightning as a sign of Moby Dick. Starbuck sees lightning as a warning, and feels tempted to shoot Ahab sleeping with a shotgun. The next morning, when he discovered that the lightning was confusing the compass, Ahab made a new one from the spear, maul, and sail-making needle. He ordered the log to be shuffled, but the broken line stopped, leaving the ship in no way to improve its location.
The Pequod is now heading southeast toward Moby Dick. A man fell from a mast of a ship. The buoy was thrown, but both were drowned. Now Queequeg proposed that his excessive casket be used as a new buoy. Starbuck ordered the carpenter to be careful that he was sleepy and asleep. The next morning, the ship meets in another clipped thread with Rachel , commanded by Capt. Gardiner of Nantucket. The Rachel is looking for survivors of one of the whaleboats who have left after Moby Dick. Among the missing are the young Gardiner. Ahab refused to join the search. Twenty-four hours a day, Ahab now stands and walks on the deck, while Fedallah shadows him. Suddenly, a sea eagle grabs Ahab's silent hat and flies with it. Furthermore, Pequod , in the ninth and final game, fulfilled Delight , was badly damaged and with five of his crew left to die by Moby Dick. The captain cried out that the harpoon that could kill the white whale had not yet been wrought, but Ahab cultivated a special spear and once again ordered the ship to advance. Ahab shares a moment of contemplation with Starbuck. Ahab speaks of his wife and son, calling himself a fool for spending 40 years in whaling, and claiming he can see his own son in Starbuck's eyes. Starbuck tries to persuade Ahab to return to Nantucket to meet their two families, but Ahab just crosses the deck and stands near Fedallah.
On the first day of the pursuit, Ahab kissed whales, climbed a pole, and looked at Moby Dick. He claims a doubloon for himself, and orders all ships to drop except for Starbuck. The whale bites Ahab's boat into two, throws the captain out, and strikes the crew. On the second day of the pursuit, Ahab left Starbuck in charge of Pequod . Moby Dick destroyed three ships looking for him into their dashes and crevices. Ahab was saved, but his ivory and fedallah were gone. Starbuck begged Ahab to stop, but Ahab promised to kill the white whale, even if he had to dive into his own world for revenge.
On the third day of pursuit, Ahab saw Moby Dick in the daytime, and sharks also appeared. Ahab dropped his boat for the last time, leaving Starbuck again on board. Moby Dick broke and destroyed two boats. The bodies of Fedallah, still trapped in dirty lines, were whipped onto the whales' back, so Moby Dick turned out to be the prophesied Fedallah captain. "Owned by all fallen angels", Ahab planted a harpoon on the whale side. Moby Dick whacked a whale, threw his men into the sea. Only Ishmael could not return to the ship. He was left at sea, and so was the only Pequod crew who survived the last meeting. The Pope is now attacking fatally Pequod . Ahab then realized that the destroyed ship was a hearse made of American wood in the prophecy of Fedallah. The Pope returns to Ahab, who pokes him again. The line was curled around Ahab's neck, and when the stray whale swam, the captain was drawn to him out of sight. The Queequeg coffin appeared to the surface, the only thing to be removed from the vortex when Pequod was drowned. For a whole day Ishmael floated on it, until Rachel, still searching for the lost sailor, rescued her.
Maps Moby-Dick
Structure
Viewpoint
Ishmael is a narrator, shaping his story using many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and symbolic readings. Over and over again, Ishmael refers to his writings on the book: "But how can I expect to explain myself here, but, in some dim and random way, explain me, I must, otherwise all these chapters may not exist." Scholar John Bryant calls him "the center of consciousness and narration". Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as the narrator of Ishmael as a character, whom he calls "Ishmael forecastle", and who is younger Ishmael a few years ago. The Ishmael narrator, then, is "only young Ishmael who grows older." The second difference avoids the confusion both of Ismail and writer Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "reject the one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael."
Chapter structure
According to critic Walter Bezanson, the structure of the chapter can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter groups", and "balance chapters". The simplest sequence is the development of narrative, then the sequence of themes such as three chapters on whale painting, and a sequence of structural similarities, such as five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or four chapters beginning with "The Candles". The chapter groups are chapters on the meaning of white, and the meaning of fire. Balancing chapters are contrasting chapters, such as "Loomings" versus "Epilogue," or the like, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles".
Scholar Lawrence Buell explains the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters as structured around three patterns: first, nine encounters of Pequod with ships that have met Moby Dick. Each has been further damaged, signifying the fate of Pequod ' itself. Second, an increasingly memorable encounter with whales. At the initial meeting, whale boats barely make contact; then there are false alarms and routine pursuits; finally, a large collection of whales on the shores of the Chinese Sea at "The Grand Fleet". A typhoon near Japan became the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick. The third pattern is cetological documentation, so luxurious it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters begin with whaling history and the papal bibliography classification, getting closer to second-hand accounts of general pope's evil and Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically arranged commentary on papal images. The climax to this section is chapter 57, "From whales in paint etc.", which begins humbly (beggars in London) and ends with a sublime (constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus the other half of this pattern, begins with the first description of a book on living whales, and then the anatomy of sperm whales is studied, more or less from front to back and from outside to inside. section, right down to the framework. Two ending chapters define the evolution of whales as species and claim their eternal nature.
Several "ten or more" of the chapters on the killing of whales, ranging from two fifths of the book, developed enough to be called "events". As Bezanson writes, "in every case, murder provokes a chapter sequence or a group of chapters from cetologic tales evolving from certain killing circumstances," so the murder is "a structural opportunity to order essays and curious preaching."
Buell observes that "narrative architecture" is "an idiosyncratic variant of a bipolar observer/narrative hero", ie, the novel is arranged around two main characters, Ahab and Ismael, which are interrelated and contrasted each other, with Ishmael. observers and narrators. As the story of Ismael, says Robert Milder, it is "educational narrative".
Bryant and Springer find that the book is organized around two consciousness of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as linearity and Ishmael power is a power of perversion. While both have angry feelings of being orphaned, they try to reconcile with this hole in its form in a different way: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot at Moby-Dick may be driven by Ahab's outrage, Ismael's desire to get an "ungraspable" account for novel lyricism. Buell sees a double search in the book: Ahab is to hunt down Moby Dick, Ismael is "to understand what to do from both whales and hunts".
One of the most distinctive features of this book is the variation of the genre. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel stories, autobiographies, Elizabethan games, and epic poetry. He called Ismael's explanatory notes to form the documentary genre of "Nabokovian touch".
Nine meetings with other ships
A significant structural device is a series of nine meetings (gams) between Pequod and other vessels. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative. The first two meetings and the last two meetings are close together. The central group of five gams is separated by about 12 chapters, approximately. This pattern provides a structural element, Bezanson says, as if the encounter was "the bone for the flesh of the book". Second, Ahab's growing response to the meetings plotted the "rising curve of his passion" and his monomania. Thirdly, unlike Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "every ship is a roll unplugged and read by a narrator." Bezanson sees no single way to explain the meaning of all these ships. On the contrary, they can be interpreted as "a metaphysical metaphysical group, a series of biblical analogues, a mask of human situations, a humorous contest in humans, a parade of nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Pope."
The Nathalia Wright scholar saw the meeting and the importance of the ship along the other lane. He chose four ships that had discovered Moby Dick. The first, Jeroboam , is named after the predecessor of the biblical King Ahab. The fate of his "prophecy" is "a warning message to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and justified by Samuel Enderby ,
Themes
Early fans for Melville Revival, the English writer E. M. Forster, commented in 1927: " Moby-Dick is full of meaning: it means a different matter." Yet he sees it as "important" in his "prophetic song" book, which flows "like the undercurrent" under surface action and morality.
Biography Laurie Robertson-Lorant sees epistemology as a book theme. The taxonomy of the Ishmael whale shows only "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of achieving certainty". He also contrasted Ismael and Ahab's attitude to life, with Ismael's open-minded and meditative "Islami's polypotism" contrary to Ahab's monomania, following the dogmatic rigidity.
Melville biographer Delbanco quoted the race as an example of this truth search under surface differences. All races are represented among the crew members of Pequod . Although Ismael initially feared Queequeg as a tattooed cannibal, he immediately decided, "Better to sleep with a drunken cannibal than a drunk Christian." While it may be rare for a mid-19th century American book to display black characters in a non-release context, slavery is often mentioned. The theme of the race is mainly done by Pip, a little black cab boy boy. When Pip nearly drowns, Ahab, completely touched by Pip's affliction, asks him gently, Pip "can only speak the language of the ad to return the fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward for Pip!'".
Editors Bryant and Springer suggest perceptions are central themes, difficulty seeing and understanding, which makes reality in hard to find and truths difficult to pin down. Ahab explains that, like all things, the evil pope uses a disguise: "All the visible objects, man, are just a whiteboard mask" - and Ahab is determined to "attack through the mask! How can prisoners reach outside, except by thrusting them through the wall? , the white whale is the wall "(Ch. 36," The Quarter-Deck "). This theme includes novels, perhaps never so firmly as in "The Doubloon" (Ch 99), in which each crewmember feels the coin in a way formed by his own personality. Later, the American edition had Ahab's "no finds" (Ch.3.3) of the pope as he looked inward. In fact, Moby Dick then swam toward him. In the English edition, Melville transforms the word "find" to "feeling", and with good reason, because "discovery" means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better yet, perception, is " what is there by the way we see it ". The point is not that Ahab will find the pope as an object, but that he will regard it as a symbol of its making.
But Melville does not offer an easy solution. Ismael's and Queequeg's friendly relationships initiated a kind of racial harmony that was destroyed when the crew dance erupted into racial conflict in "Midnight, Forecastle" (Ch 40). Fifty chapters later, Pip suffered mental disintegration after he was reminded that as a slave he would be worth less than a whale. Enslaved and persecuted, "Pip becomes a ship's conscience". His view of property is another example of grappling with moral choices. In Chapter 89, Ishmael explained the concept of fast fish and loose fish, which grants ownership rights to those who took possession of abandoned fish or ships, and observed that the British Empire ruled the American Indians in colonial territory. times just by way of whale hunters taking on unclaimed whale ownership.
This novel has also been read as critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement of Transcendentalism, attacking the notorious Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. Life and death Ahab has been read as an attack on Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance, for one, in potential destructive and potential justification for egoism. Richard Chase wrote that for Melville, 'Death-spiritual, emotional, physical â € "is the price of independence when pushed to the point of solipsism, where the world has no existence apart from all-sufficient self. In that case, Chase sees Melville's art as contrary to Emerson's thinking, that Melville '[points] increases the danger of excessive self-esteem, rather than, like [...] Emerson loves doing it, [recommended] the vital possibilities of the self. 'Newton Arvin further points out that independence is, for Melville, really' [disguised in a weed of kings] wild, anarchic, irresponsible, and destructive egoism. '
Style
The incomplete inventory of Moby-Dick's Moby-Dick by Bryant and Springer editors includes "nautical, biblical, Homer, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological" influences, and his style is "alliteration, delusion, colloquialism, ancient, and incessantly offensive ": Melville examines and exhausts the possibilities of grammar, quotes from various well known or unclear sources, and swings from quiet prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seafaring slang, mystical speculation, or wild prophetic archeology.
Many words that form the vocabulary of Moby-Dick are Melville's own coins, critic Newton Arvin admits, as if the English vocabulary is too limited for the complicated things Melville has to say. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as alang-alang , coincidings , and leewardings . Equally abundant are unknown adjectives and adjectives, including participatory adjectives such as commanded , omnitooled , and uncatastrophied ; participative adverbs such as intermixingly , delayed , and not interpolated ; rare such as unsupported spermy and leviathanic and descriptions like sultan , language Spanish , and Venetianly ; and adjective compounds ranging from bizarre to extraordinary, such as "messenger carrying ", "spinning sun ", and "tooth-tooth shark". It is less rare for Melville to make his own verbs from nouns, but he does this with what Arvin calls "irresistible effects," as in "who does his thunder he is higher than the throne," and "my fingers... start... to serpentine and spiral ". For Arvin, the essence of Moby-Dick's writing style lies in
- the realization that actions and conditions, movements and stasis, objects and ideas, are only surface aspects of an underlying reality.
Arwin's category has been slightly expanded by later critics, notably Warner Berthoff. Superabundant vocabulary from work can be broken down into strategies used individually and in combination. First, the original modification of words as "Leviathanism" and the repetition of excessively altered words, such as in the series "sad", "pity", "pity" and "heartbreaking" (Chu 81, "Pequod Meet the Virgin" ). Second, the use of existing words in new ways, such as "pile" and "duty". Thirdly, words are lifted from specific fields, as "fossils". Fourth, the use of an unusual combination of adjectives-nouns, such as in "eyebrow concentration" and "immaculate sanctity" (Ch.26, "Knights and Squires"). Fifth, using participative modifiers to emphasize and reinforce the expectations of an established reader, such as the words "preluding" and "shadow" ("so calm and calm, but somehow opening them are all scenes..."; "In this interval of omens... ").
Characteristics of style elements of other types are echoes and tones. Responsible for this is Melville's imitation of certain different styles and habits of using the resources to form his own work. The three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Another important stylistic element is some level of rhetoric, the simplest of which is the "relatively obvious style of expository " of many passages in the cetological chapters, although they "rarely persist, and serve primarily as transitions" between the more sophisticated levels. One of them is the poetic "poetic" rhetoric, which Bezanson says is "well exemplified" in the soliloquy quarter of an hour of Ahab, to the point that it can be used as an empty verse. Arranged above a geometric pattern, the rhythm is "uniformly controlled - too evenly possible for prose," Bezanson suggests. The third level rhetoric is idiomatic , and just as its poetics are barely present in pure form. An example is the "excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as the way he pushes the rowing crew into a rhythm of speech that shows "a knock of a paddle taking a metronomic meter". The fourth and final rhetoric is the composite , the "extraordinary blend" of the first three elements and other possible elements:
The Nantucketer, he himself lives and riots in the sea; he himself, in the Bible language, descended on the ship; to and fro him as his own private plantation. There is his home; exist located its buisiness, which Noah's flood will not interfere, though it floods all the millions in China. He lives in the sea, like a prairie chicken in a meadow; he is hiding among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb Alps. For years he did not know the land; so that when he comes to the end, it smells like another world, stranger than the moon for an Earthman. With a landless seagull, as the sun sets folded its wings and is rocked to sleep among the mounds; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, invisible from the land, drenching the screen, and putting it in his dwelling, while under his rush of cushioning herds of walruses and whales. ("Nantucket," Ch. 14).
This section, from a chapter that Bezanson calls "funny poetry of prose," blends "high and low with a relaxed assurance". Similarly great passages include "the great hymn to spiritual democracy" which can be found in the midst of "Knights and Squires".
Homer's metaphorical usage in detail may not have been learned from Homer himself, but Matthiessen finds Homer's "more consistent live" writing than at the level of Shakespeare, especially during the last pursuit of "accumulated control" of such imagery emphasizes Ahab pride through land-image succession, : "The ship is tearing, leaving a path like the sea as when the cannon balls, missent, become plowshare producer and rise to field level" ("The Chase - Second Day," Ch. 134). One parable along one paragraph illustrates how 30 crew members become one unit:
Because as one ship holds them all; though it is united from all the contrasting things - oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp - but all these are facing each other in a concrete hull, shot in the road, well balanced and directed by a long keel; nevertheless, all the individuality of the crew, the courage of this man, the man's fear; guilt and guilt, all varieties welded into unity, and all directed to a fatal destination that Ahab one master and their bridle do. ("The Chase - Second Day," Ch. 134).
The last sentence combines two parts of comparison, the male becomes synonymous with the ship, which follows the direction of Ahab. Concentration only provides a way for more imagery, with "mastheads, like the peak of a high palm, waving with hands and feet". All of these images contribute their "surprising energy" to the progress of the narrative. When the boat is lowered, imaging works to dwarf everything except Ahab's will in the presence of Moby Dick. These parables, with their amazing "imaginary abundance" are not only invaluable in creating dramatic movements, Matthiessen observes: "They are no less important for the width, and more sustainable among them, for the heroic dignity."
Shakespeare Assimilation
Shakespeare's influence on the book has been analyzed by F.O. Matthiessen in his 1941 study of the American Renaissance with such results nearly half a century later Bezanson still regarded him as "the richest critic of the matter." According to Matthiesen, then, "Melville's property by Shakespeare goes far beyond all other influences" because it makes Melville discover his own strength "through the most abundant challenge of imagination in history". Especially the influence of King Lear and Macbeth has attracted scientific attention. Almost every debt page for Shakespeare can be found, whether difficult or easy to recognize. Matthiessen points out that "only sound, full of Leviathanism, but signifies anything" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echoes the famous phrase in Macbeth : "Narrated by a fool, full of sound and anger, Indicating anything. "As Matthiessen pointed out, Ahab's first long speech to the crew, in" Quarter-Deck "(Ch.36), was" a nearly empty package, and can be printed like that ":
But look at you, Starbuck, what's said in the heat,
The thing did not go wrong. There are men
From whom the warm words are small insults I mean not to incite you. Leave it alone See! look there Turkish cheek from the spurs look--
The living and breathtaking photos are painted by the sun Leopard's tortoise - uncontrolled and
Ignore things, living; and find and give
There is no reason for the blazing life they feel!
Most importantly, through Shakespeare, Melville incorporated Moby-Dick with the power of expression he had not previously possessed. Reading Shakespeare, according to Matthiessen, has become a "catalytic agent" for Melville, who changed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of a profound natural force". The extent to which Melville has full power is shown by Matthiessen through the account of Ahab, which ends with the language "which shows Shakespeare but not a replica of it: 'Oh, Ahab! What will be great for you, it must be plucked from the sky and deeply dipped, and displayed in the unmodern air! 'The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems very typical of Shakespeare, "but his two key words appear only once in the drama... and none of this use is Melville indebted to his new combination." Melville's assimilation Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gives Moby-Dick a kind of diction that is independent of the source, and it can, as DH Lawrence says, convey something "almost super-human or inhuman, greater than life "This prose is not based on the verses of others but on the" rhythm of speech ".
In addition to this sense of rhythm, Melville acquired a verbal resource which for Matthiessen pointed out that he "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret about how to make the language itself dramatic". He has learned three important things, Matthiessen concludes:
- To rely on action verbs, "which put dynamic pressure on movement and meaning." The effective tension caused by the contrast of "you launch a full-delivery naval world" and "some here who still remain indifferent" in "The Candles" (Chr 119) made the final clause cause "the necessity to attack the breasts" , which shows "how much of a witness the drama has appeared in words;"
- The energy of Shakespeare's verbal compounds is not lost to him ("full-freighted");
- And finally, Melville learned how to deal with "the quick feelings of life that come from making one part of the act of acting as another - for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or coining from 'without place', the adjective of nouns. "
The creation of Ahab, Melville Leon Howard's biographer found, follows observations by Coleridge in his talk on Hamlet : "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating character is to understand one of the intellectual or moral faculties in morbid morbidness ; " all mortal beauty is just illness. "Moreover, in Howard's view, Ismael's self-references as" tragic playwright ", and his defense of a hero's choice that lacks" all the great outward embellishments "is evidence that Melville "in the same manner dar thinks of his protagonist as a tragic hero found in Hamlet and King Lear ".
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Autobiographical elements
Moby-Dick is based on Melville's experience on whaler Acushnet , but even the most telling story of a papal whaling book is not direct autobiography. On December 30, 1840, he entered as a green hand for the inaugural voyage of Acushnet , which is planned to last for 52 months. The owner, Melvin O. Bradford, resembled Bildad, who signed Ishmael, that he was a Quaker: in some instances when he signed the document, he removed the word "swear" and replaced it with "affirm". But shareholders of Acushnet are relatively wealthy, while the owner of Pequod includes poor widows and orphaned children. The captain is Valentine Pease, Jr., who was 43 years old at the start of the voyage. Although 26 men enrolled as crew members, two people did not show up for the departure of the ship and were replaced by a new crew member. The crew is not heterogeneous or exotic as a crew of Pequod . Five of his crew are foreigners, four are Portuguese, and the other is American, either at birth or naturalized. Three black men were in the crew, two sailors and a cook. Fleece, the cook from Pequod, is also black, so maybe imitate this Philadelphia-born William Maiden, who was 38 when she signed for Acushnet.
Only 11 out of the 26 original crew members completed the voyage. Others are either abandoned or discarded regularly. First Officer, Frederic Raymond, left the ship after "fighting" with the captain. The first pair, actually named Edward C. Starbuck, was on a previous trip with Captain Pease, in the early 1830s, and was banished in Tahiti under mysterious circumstances. The second couple at Acushnet was John Hall, born in England but a naturalized American. He is identified as Stubb in an annotation in a copy of the book of crew member Henry Hubbard, who, like Melville, has joined the voyage as a green hand. Hubbard also identified a model for Pip: John Backus, a small black man who added to the crew during the voyage. Hubbard annotations appear in chapter "The Castaway" and reveal that Pip falling into water is authentic; Hubbard was with him in the same boat when the incident happened.
Ahab seems to have no model in real life, though his death may be based on actual events. On May 18, 1843, Melville was on board The Star, which sailed to Honolulu. Aboard are two sailors from Nantucket who can tell him that they've seen their second couple "taken out of the submarine by a foul line and drown". The model for Whaleman's Chapel chapter 7 is Bethel Seamen at Johnny Cake Hill. Melville attended a service there shortly before he was sent out on Acushnet, and he heard a sermon by the pastor, the 63-year-old Pastor Enoch Mudge, who was at least partly a model for Father Mapple. Even the topic of Jonah and the Pope may be authentic, as Mudge was a contributor to Sailor's Magazine, printed in December 1840 of the ninth series of sermons on Jonah.
Whaling resources
In addition to his own experience on the Acushnet whaling vessel, two events actually served as the origin for the Melville story. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after a sperm whale crashed 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the west coast of South America. One friend Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events of his 1821. The Most Extraordinary and Pathetic Sailing Narration of the Essex Whales.
Another incident was an alleged assassination in the late 1830s from the sperm sperm albino Mocha Dick, in the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick is rumored to have 20 or more spears on his back from other whale hunters, and appears to attack the ship with planned ferocity. One of his battles with a pope captor serves the subject for an article by explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 edition of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine. Melville is familiar with the article, which describes:
This famous monster, who has won in a hundred fights with his pursuers, is an old bull whale, with incredible size and power. From the effects of age, or more likely from the peculiarities of nature... a single consequence has resulted - she is white as wool!
Significantly, Reynolds wrote the first person narrative that serves as a frame for the story of a whaling captain he met. The captain resembles Ahab and shows the same symbolism and motivation in hunting this pope, when when his crew first met Mocha Dick and his cowers, the captain exerted them:
As he approached, with his long arched back sometimes rising above the surface of the pile, we saw that it was as white as the waves around him; and people staring at each other, as they say, in a suppressed tone, bad name MOCHA DICK!
"Mocha Dick or d ---- l [demons] ', I said,' this boat is never separated from anything that whales use. '
Mocha Dick has more than 100 encounters with whalers in decades between the 1810s and 1830s. He is described as a giant and covered in barnacles. Although he is the most famous, Mocha Dick is not the only white whale in the sea, or the only whale that attacked the hunters.
While the accidental collision with the sperm whale at night contributed to the sinking of the Union in 1807, it was not until August 1851 that the whaler of Ann Alexander, while hunting in the Pacific from the GalÃppagos Islands , being the second ship since Essex was attacked, perforated, and drowned by whales. Melville commented, "My God! What's the commentator is this Ann Alexander whale? What he says is brief & amp; very important & I'm wondering if my demonic art has lifted this giant. "
Although Melville has made use of his different sailing experiences in his previous novels, such as Mardi , he never focused specifically on whaling. The 18 months he spent as an ordinary sailor aboard the aircraft carrier Acushnet in 1841-42, and one incident in particular, are now inspiring. During the "sea gam" (meeting between ships), he met Chase's son, William, who lent his father's book. Melville later wrote:
I asked him about his father's adventures; [...] he goes to his chest & amp; handed me a full copy of [...] from Narrative [of Essex disaster]. This is the first printed report I've ever seen. The reading of this amazing story in the landless sea, and so close to the latitude of the ship, had a surprising effect on me.
The book is not printed, and rare. Melville allowed his interest in the book to be discovered by his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, whose friend at Nantucket got an imperfect but clean copy that Shaw gave Melville in April 1851. Melville read this copy with enthusiasm, making excessive notes in it. , and tied it up, kept it in his library for the rest of his life.
Moby-Dick contains a large part - most of them narrated by Ismael - which seems to have nothing to do with the plot, but describes the whaling business aspect. Although a successful previous novel about the Nantucket fish catcher was written, Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman (1835) by Joseph C. Hart, which is credited with influencing elements of Melville's work, most of the fishing tales the pope tended to be the sensational tales of bloody rebellion, and Melville believes that no book up to that time has described the whaling industry in an interesting or direct way as it did it.
Melville finds most of his data on whales and whale hunts in five books, most importantly by British ship surgeon Thomas Beale, Natural History of Sperm Whale (1839), a famous book of authority purchased by Melville on July 10, 1850. "On a scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith wrote, "the significance of this [source] to the Moby-Dick composition goes beyond any other source book from which Melville is known to have been withdrawn. "According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, the general effect of this resource is to provide regulation of whaling data in chapters. Melville follows Beale's grouping carefully, but adapts it to what the art requires, and he changes the original original phrase into talking figures. The most important second whaling book is Frederick Debell Bennett, A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe, from 1833 to 1836 (1840), from which Melville also took the Chapter organization, but to a lesser extent than he learned from Beale.
The third book is what Melville reviewed for the Literary World in 1847, J. Ross Browne of Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846), which may have given Melville the first thought for the book of arrest whales, and in any case contains embarrassing parts similar to those in Moby-Dick . The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever The Whale and His Captors (1850), is used for two episodes in Moby-Dick but may appear too late in writing the novel to be much more useful. Melville is looting the fifth book, William Scoresby, Jr., Arctic Region Account with North Whale Fishing History and Description (1820), though - unlike four other books - the subject is Greenland whales rather than sperm whales. Though this book became the standard reference for whale hunting shortly after publication, Melville quipped and parodied it on several occasions - for example in the narwhales description in the "Cetology" chapter, where he called Scoresby "Charley Coffin" and gave his account "twist humor fact": "Scoresby will help Melville a few times, and at every opportunity Melville will quip her with a pseudonym. "Vincent suggests several reasons for Melville's attitude towards Scoresby, including droughts and abundance of irrelevant data, but the main reason seems to be that the Greenland whale is the closest competitor to sperm sperm for public attention, so Melville feels obliged to ignore everything related to it.
Composition
The earliest surviving mention of the composition of what became Moby-Dick is the last paragraph of the letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on 1 May 1850:
About "whaling trips" - I'm halfway to work, & amp; I'm so glad your advice is so jumping with me. This would be some kind of weird book, tho ', I'm afraid; fat is the fat you know; 'You may get oil from it, poetry goes as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; - & amp; to cook it, one has to vent a little imaginary, which of the nature of the thing, must be rigidly as gambas of the whale itself. But I intend to give the truth of it, regardless of this.
Some experts conclude that Melville composes Moby-Dick in two or even three stages. By reason of a series of structural inconsistencies and developments in the final version, they hypothesized that the work he referred to Dana was, in the words of Lawrence Buell, a relatively straightforward "whaling adventure", but Shakespeare's readings and his encounter with Hawthorne inspired him to write repeated as the "epic proportion of the cosmic encyclopedia". Bezanson objected that the letter contained too much ambiguity to assume "that 'Dana's suggestion' would obviously be that Melville did for the hunt what he had done to live on a war soldier on the White Jacket. In addition, Dana has experienced how dramatic the story is in the dramatic story when she met him in Boston, so perhaps his "suggestion" is that Melville did the book that captured the prize. "And the long sentence in the middle of the quote only acknowledges that Melville is struggling with problem, not choosing between facts and delusions but about how to relate them.The most positive statement is that it will be some kind of weird book and that Melville means giving the truth about it, but what is not really clear.
Melville may have found the plot before writing or developing it after the writing process is in progress. Given its complex source of use, it is "safe to say" that they helped to form a narrative, including the plot. Scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer cite the development of Ismael's character as another factor that extends Melville's composition process and which can be inferred from the final version structure of this book. Ishmael, in the early chapters, was just a narrator, just like the narrators in the previous marine adventure at Melville, but in subsequent chapters became a mystical stage manager who became the center of the tragedy.
Less than two months after mentioning the project to Dana, Melville reported in a June 27 letter to Richard Bentley, his British publisher:
My Dear Sir, - In the latter part of autumn I will prepare a new job; and I am writing you now to propose his publication in England. This book is an adventure romance, founded on certain wild legends in the South Sperm Whale Fishery, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, two years & amp; more, as a harpooneer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, in late March 1850. He was friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Melville began on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic. by mutual friends. Melville wrote an unofficial review of Hawthorne's short story collection of Old Manse's "Moss of Old Manse" titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared on The Literary World on August 17 and 24. Bezanson found the essay "strongly associated with Melville's imaginative and intellectual world when writing Moby-Dick " which can be considered as a virtual introduction and should be the "main part of contextual reading" of all people. In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne with Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repetition of the word "genius", more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in insistence that "unapproachable" Shakespeare is nonsense to Americans.
The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850-1851, when Melville had changed the noise of New York City to a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The move may have delayed the completion of the book. During these months, he wrote several letters of joy to Hawthorne, including one June 1851 in which he summarized his career: "What I feel most moved to write, which is forbidden, - it will not pay.However, write down < I can not, so this product is the final hash, and all my books are destructive. "This is a stubborn Melville standing next to Mardi and talking about his other book , more commercial books with contempt. The letter also reveals how Melville progressed from the 25th year: "Three weeks has passed, anytime between now and now, that I have not opened yet, but I feel that I am now coming to the deepest leaves of the bulb, and that soon flowers have to fall into print. "Another theory holds that knowing Hawthorne first inspired him to write the tragic obsession of Ahab into the book, but Bryant and Springer declared that Melville had another encounter that could have triggered his imagination, like Jonah and Job of the Bible. , Demon Milton, King Lear Shakespeare, Byron's hero.
Book composition theories have been stoned in three ways, first by appealing against the use of evidence and evidence itself. Scholar Robert Milder sees "inadequate proof and questionable methodology" in the workplace. John Bryant found "little concrete evidence, and nothing conclusive, to show that Melville radically changed the structure or conception of the book". The second type of objection is based on Melville's intellectual development. Bezanson was not convinced that before he met Hawthorne, "Melville is not ready for this kind of book Moby-Dick to be", because in his letters from the time Melville denounced his two â € Å"nar directly, Redburn and White-Jacket, as two books written for money only, and he stands firmly as a kind of book he believes. the language is "very rich in the behavior of the 17th century", characteristic of Moby-Dick. The third type calls the literary nature of the part used as evidence. Lighter, cetological chapters can not be left over from the earliest stages of composition and any theory that they "will ultimately be the stubborn foundation of these chapters", since no scholar who embraces the theory has yet to explain how the chapters this "can dwell well." thematic relationships with symbolic stories that have not been conceived. "Buell found that theories are based on a combination of selected parts of let ters and what are considered" edges "in the book not only" tend to dissolve in conjecture ", but he also pointed out that this so-called loose ending may be intended by the author: repeatedly the book mentions "the necessary irregularities of great effort." Despite all this, Buell found evidence that Melville altered his ambitions during his "overall convincing" writing.
Publishing history
Melville first proposed an English publication in a June 27, 1850 letter to Richard Bentley, a London publisher of his earlier works. Textual expert G. Thomas Tanselle explains that for previous books, American proof sheets have been sent to British publishers and publications in the United States have been postponed until the work has been set in type and published in the UK. This procedure is intended to provide the best (though still uncertain) claim for the English copyright of the work of America. In the case of Moby-Dick, Melville has taken almost a year longer than promised, and can not rely on Harpers to prepare evidence as they did for previous books. Indeed, Harpers denied him forward, and since he owed them nearly $ 700, he was forced to borrow money and to arrange his layout and distribution. John Bryant points out that he did "to reduce the number of hands that play with his text".
The final stage of the composition overlaps with the initial stages of publication. In June 1851, Melville wrote to Hawthorne that he was in New York to "work and work hard on my 'Pope' while driving through the press." At the end of the month, "tired of long printer delays", Melville returns to finish work on a book in Pittsfield. Three weeks later, the arrangement of the letters is almost complete, as he announces to Bentley on July 20: "I am now passing through the press, the cover sheet of my new job". While Melville writes and corrects simultaneously what has been established, the corrected evidence will be plated, that is, the type specified in the final form. Since the previous chapters were layered while he was revising the latter, Melville certainly "feels limited in the type of decent revision".
On July 3, 1851, Bentley offered Melville? 150 and "half profit", that is, half the profit left after the expenditure of production and advertising. On July 20, Melville was accepted, after Bentley made the contract on 13 August. Melville signed and returned the contract in early September, and then went to New York with a proof sheet, made from a finished slab, which he sent to London by his brother Allan on September 10. For over a month, this evidence has existed in Melville's ownership, and since the book will be set again in England, he can devote all his time to correcting and revising it. He still does not have an American publisher, so his usual rush about getting English publications to precede Americans is absent. Only on 12 September the signing contract of Harper was signed. Bentley received a proof sheet with the marked Melville correction and revision on them on September 24th. He published the book less than four weeks later.
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