Summary of “Moby Dick Melville”
The novel “Moby Dick, or White Whale” (1851) stands at the center of the writer’s work. This is a Melvillian masterpiece, moreover, it is a synthesis of all the ideological and artistic experience of American romantic prose.
Pioneer of domestic novelistics, as we recall, was Fenimore Cooper. He fearlessly experimented with various types of novel and exhausted almost all of his genre varieties, except the philosophical novel. “Moby Dick” is an adventure, sea, whaling, social, fantastic, moral, novel-epic and philosophical novel at the same time. Moreover, one here can not be separated from the other; the text does not break up into adventure, fantasy, moral and philosophical pieces, but is a kind of monolith in which different types of narration intertwine and sprout through each other. Let us consider how the elements of different genre varieties of the novel coexist in the Maltillian text.
“Moby Dick” as a whaling novel is unique
Soon it becomes obvious that the Melvillian “cytology” grows over the fishing and biological boundaries. The notion of the whale as a biological species recedes further, it becomes the personification of the forces that torment the human brain and heart. The image of the whale in its symbolic aspect is growing, and finally, on the pages of the novel appears snow-white Moby Dick – a polysyllabic symbol, the embodiment of horror, the very tragic fate of mankind.
“Moby Dick”
Once in this symbolic dimension, the ship “Pecod” with his team also acquire special significance. The multinational crew of the “Pecoda” is perceived as a symbol of humanity wandering the ocean of life. At the same time, the international crew of the ship is also the symbolic embodiment of America (unlike allegory, the symbol is always meaningful). In the image of “Pecoda”, carried away to death by the fanatical madness of the captain with the Biblical name Ahab, there is both a timeless, and quite concrete social and political meaning.
The 1840s in the United States were years of growing contradictions between the North and the South. Melville, unconditional supporter of the abolition of slavery, could not nevertheless not see that the boiling of social passions poses a threat to the life of the nation. Fanaticism always seemed to him like madness. Melville feared that, inspired by the noble intent to destroy Evil, but blinded by fanaticism, the abolitionists could destroy America. And so, in the ending of the novel, in complete calm, under the rays of the bright midday sun the star-striped flag plunges into the abyss. “Look, Americans, and freeze from horror,” warns Melville.
The peculiarity of Moby Dick as a social novel lies in the fact that social life appears here in an unusual and complicated form. And, in addition, symbolic images of a generalizing nature grow on this basis: “Pecod” is perceived as an image of the world.
But, first of all, “Moby Dick” is a philosophical novel, for the solution of universal problems is the cornerstone here. It’s not about thinking about the philosophical systems popular in the nineteenth century, but in striving to comprehend the world, to penetrate into the essence of such cardinal issues of being as Good and Evil, Life and Death, and the eternal conflict between them. This is the main theme of the novel. It is solved through the whole system of symbolic images-generalizations, the most important of which is the White Whale, Moby Dick, the image is extremely polysemantic.
In the critical literature about the novel, there are many attempts at interpreting this image. He, however, is practically inexhaustible. It is no accident for every member of the crew he is different than for the rest. For Ahab, he is the unconditional embodiment of the world evil. For Ishmael, a simple sailor, but a man educated, capable of abstract thinking, not blinded by a thirst for revenge, Moby Dick is a symbol of the universe. Most interesting here is the view of Izmail, partly coinciding with the author’s.
Moby Dick, who personifies the vast, mysterious Cosmos, is beautiful and at the same time terrible. It is beautiful, because it is white, huge, endowed with fantastic power. He is terrible for the same reasons. Whale whiteness is associated with the associations that this color produces (death, shroud, cold), but, most importantly, with the fact that the whiteness is colorless, it is the apparent absence of any color. Whiteness, personifying something in the mind of man, is not itself anything; in it there is neither good nor evil – there is only monstrous indifference in it. And if we take Moby Dick as a symbol of the Universe, then the Melvillian picture of the world turns out to be exceptionally bold and cruel. In the Universe there is neither Good nor Evil, there is no higher reasonable moral power governing human life and death. They are aimless. There is nothing but uncertainty, emptiness and immensity.
Later, such a difficult period for G. Melville, his work was very difficult for Romantic writers, whose personal circumstances were more favorable. During the war, all fiction in the United States seemed to stand still in anticipation. The researchers are amazed by this fact, but meanwhile, even before the start of the battles, RW Emerson predicted: “All arts are dissolved in a single art of war.” War is not the time for fiction; The American Civil War gave rise to speeches, sermons, reports, soldiers’ songs, popular war hymns and poems, such as John Brown’s Body, Julia Ward Howe’s Military Anthem of the Republic, or Daniel D. Emmett’s Dixie.
But the war is often followed by a powerful explosion of creative energy, and there are works that transmit the battle experience (as happened after the First World War). In the United States during the period of Reconstruction, the romantic reflection of war, as well as the general adherence to the principles of romanticism in art, was possible only in poetry. In this connection, the publication of Melville’s “Military Poems” (1866) and his conversion to the poet in the second half of the 1860s-1880s is not forced, but on the contrary, quite natural-a sensitive pulse of the era.
At the same time, poems appeared about the Civil War of the renowned reformer of American poetry Walt Whitman (“Drum Fraction”, 1865), JG Wittier, Henry Timroda and the largest poet of the post-war South, young veteran Sidney Lanir. And not only about battles, victories and defeats, drum combat and whistles of shells, they wrote, but they tried to determine the place of man in this shattered world (S. Lanir), reflected on his relationship with the Creator (Clareil G. Melville), about his the right to exist on this earth, to love it and rejoice in it (W. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass).
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