Desire in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick Essay -- Moby Dick Essays

disposition in Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick Moby-Dick describes the metamorphosis of character resulting from the archetypal night sea journey, a excruciating account of a withdrawal and a return. Thus Ishmael, the lone subsister of the Pequod disaster, requires three decades of voracious reading, spiritual meditation, and philosophical reflection before tattle his adventures aboard the ill-fated ship.1 His tale is astounding. With Lewis Mumfords seminal study Herman Melville A Critical Biography (1929) marking the advent of the Melville industry, attentive readersamateur and paid alikehave reached consensus respecting the textbooks massive and heterogeneous structure. Moby Dick, for either its undeniable heuristic treasures, remains a taxonomists nightmare. For Melvilles complex narrative is an embarrassment of riches variously described as a novel, a romance, and an epic, as a comedy and a tragedy. Indeed, the text is an anatomy of the adventure story in the tradition of world continent accounts of the epic hero from Gilgamesh to the Arabian Nights, from the 0dyssey to Beowulf. Although from a formalist perspective Ishmael is intelligibly the sole narrator, the tale remains markedly divided in nerve that is, the tone, diction, register, and underlying psychology of the account describe two radically antithetical modes of experience. Ishmael in his own voice is empirical, democratic, sane, philosophical, comedic while Ahabs handle is transcendental, autocratic, mad, rhetorical, tragic. Still, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (whose class, values, and mind set are separate and discrete) Ishmael, the cat valium sailor before the mast, and Ahab, the demonic ship captain, finally emerge as disjoined fragment... ... 11 Zizek, 3. 12Zizek, ix. Works Cited Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. NYC Criterion Books, 1960.-----------------. Come Back to the Raft Agin, Huck love Partisan Review 15 (1948) 2 664-71.Freud, Sigmun d. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. and edit. James Strachey. NYC Norton, 1961. Girard, Rene. Deceit, Desire and the Novel Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965.Kristeva, Julia. ignominious Sun Depression and Melancholia. NYC Columbia Univ. Press, 1989.Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. NYC Penquin Books, 1992.Said, Edward. Orientalism. NYC Pantheon, 1978.Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger. Chicago IL Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. Zizek, Slavoj. extol Your Symptom NYC Routledge, 1992.