1. Lecture Tasks A Brief Survey Herman Melville &Moby Dick
Home assignment

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne & Herman Melville

4. Herman Melville( )

5. Masterpieces

6. Herman Melville
“Master of
philosophical
allegory”

7. Moby Dick

9. An encyclopedia of everything
Moby Dick
An encyclopedia of everything
A shakespearean tragedy
A philosophical allegory

10. Moby Dick
An encyclopedia of everything

11. Various
Species
whales

12. Whaling
Industry

13. harpooner harpoon

14. An encyclopedia of everything
Moby Dick
An encyclopedia of everything
A shakespearean tragedy
A philosophical allegory

15. allegory Examples: Fairie Queen by Spenser;
Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
Examples: Fairie Queen by Spenser;
Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan;
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne .

16. Plot of the Novel

17. Ishmael

18. Pequod

19. Captain Ahab

20. A Doubloon

21. Moby Dick

22. Climax of the Story

23. Noble Savage--Queequeg

24. Main Themes
 Alienation
Rejection and Quest

25. Alienation
Man and Man
Man and Society
Man and Nature
Dehumanization

26. Melville describes him in mostly alien terms:
Ahab is a spectral figure haunting Stubb's dreams and existing in a place away from the living.
He is in some ways a machine, unaffected by human appetites and without recognizable emotion.
He claims himself a God over the Pequod, but instead he may be a Satanic figure.

27. Main Themes
 Alienation
Rejection and Quest

28. Rejection and Quest

29. Rejection and Quest
“Call Me Ishmael”

30. Ishmael---wanderer & outcast in the Bible

31. Rejection and Quest
Escapist--to accept - to love to understand-to survive

32. Queequeg’s Coffin— Ishmael’s life-buoy

33. Rejection and Quest
The journey is a quest of knowledge and values ; love and brotherhood

34. Symbolism Moby Dick- The Whale as a Symbol of Unparalleled Greatness
The Whale as an embodiment of nature
The Whale as an Undefinable Figure
The Whale as a Part of Ahab

35. Moby Dick represents the idea of duality of meaning in the universe
Evil Malevolent Destructive
Both
Goodness Benign Nourishing

36. Whiteness Paradoxical color
Death
Absence
Opacity
Corruption
Ugliness
Purity
Innocence
Youth

37. Voyage-
The search for the ultimate truth of experience

38. Home Assignment
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Fifty-four

39. Chapter Forty-One: Moby Dick:
Even Ishmael is not immune to the hysteria with regard to Moby Dick, as he readily admits at the start of this chapter. However, it is more important to note the intense danger of this mission that Melville foreshadows through this chapter. Melville describes the whale as not only dangerous, but nearly supernatural and ghostly. He explicitly states what Moby Dick represents for Ahab; the whale symbolizes the hatred and rage of humanity. This redefines the quest against the whale, for Ahab thus comes to represent humanity's attempts to fight against its own worst impulses. Therefore, even when the conflict comes down to the fight between Ahab and Moby Dick, it will nevertheless still remain an internal conflict within Ahab.

40. Chapter Forty-Two: The Whiteness of the Whale:
In this chapter, Herman Melville attempts to define Moby Dick through its whiteness, instead finding that the very nature of the color white defies definition. While Melville does confront symbolic interpretation of the color white as symbolic of purity or innocence, he instead finds whiteness to represent absence or opacity. This suggests that the white whale Moby Dick resists any definition or internal meaning. Whatever meaning or symbolism that the whale holds exists entirely in relation to others' perceptions of it. To be explicit, Moby Dick gains definition and symbolic value only in terms of its relation to Ahab and, to a much lesser extent, the other members of the Pequod crew.

41. Further Consideration
Does Moby Dick follow the classic form of the novel as it was being written at the time Melville wrote it?