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HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891) - Coggle Diagram
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)
LIFE
born in New York City from a merchant family
after his father's death he left school for financial difficulties
he worked as crew on a merchant ship and travelled widely
1841 sailed on his first voyage on the whaling ship
Acushnet
1842 he deserted the ship due to the hard life on it and spent some time with the Typees, a tribe on the Marquesas Islands
he escaped to Tahiti, Hawaii and then returned home on a US ship
after the publication of his works he knew Nathaniel Hawthorne, who encouraged him to adopt a symbolical and complex narrative form
after the publication of
Moby Dick
his reputation declined
when he died he had been almost forgotten and his reputation revived only after the posthumous publication of his last work
WORKS
1846
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian life
1847
Omoo
Typee
's sequel
1851
Moby Dick
decline of Melville's popularity
1924 (posthumous)
Billy Budd, Foretopman
his literary reputation revived since then
MOBY DICK
PLOT
Ahab
, captain of the whaling ship
Pequod
has devoted his life to hunting the white sperm whale Moby Dick, which had bitten off his leg during a previous expedition.
The crew of the ship consists of:
The whale is seen and hunted for 3 days. Ahab wounds Moby Dick, who destroys the
Pequod
and its crew. Only Ishmael survives floating upon a coffin and is saved to tell the story.
Starbuck, wise and cautious
Queequeg, a superstitious Maori able with the harpoon
Pip, the cabin boy
Ishmael, the narrator, who joins them in Nantucket before the departure of the ship
CAPTAIN AHAB
his activity is seen as blasphemous because:
he believes himself to be equal to God
he rejects God in favour of an alliance with the Devil: he asks for his harpoon to be baptised in the name of the Devil
the voice of the instinctive spirituality of the New World, which rejects the tyranny of nature over man
interpretation by Harold Bloom
the AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
THEMES
American ideal
a mixture of races united by the search for an ideal
Pessimism
literary and religious echoes
Ulysses' wanderings
Jonah, who refused to obey his destiny
Coleridge's
Mariner
: Ishmael survives like the Mariner and recognises the beauty of the whale as a creature of God
the whiteness of the whale
absence of colour seen by Ishmael as absence of meaning
biological and historical superiority
the personification of the evil of the world for Ahab
the embodiment of the quest for a reason for existence
a symbol of the forces of nature, capable of sudden destruction
the conflict between man and nature, seen as a 'commodity' (source of oil, meat, bones)
STYLE
colloquial speech
symbolical and figurative style
dictionary definitions of the whale, 13 translations, 80 quotations, detailed description of its anatomy
first-person narration and omniscient impersonal narration
irony, parody, soliloquy & stage directions (Shakespeare)
FILM VERSION:
In the heart of the sea
(2015) by Ron Howard, based on the story of the ship
Essex
that may have inspired
Moby Dick