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

zest in Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick Moby-Dick describes the metamorphosis of character resulting from the archetypal night sea journey, a harrowing account of a withdrawal and a return. hence Ishmael, the lone survivor of the Pequod disaster, requires three decades of voracious reading, spiritual meditation, and philosophical materialisation before recounting his adventures aboard the ill-fated ship.1 His tale is astounding. With Lewis Mumfords creative study Herman Melville A Critical Biography (1929) marking the advent of the Melville industry, paying attention readersamateur and professional alikehave reached consensus respecting the texts gigantic and heterogeneous structure. Moby Dick, for all its undeniable heuristic treasures, remains a systematists nightm are. For Melvilles complex narrative is an embarrassment of riches diversely described as a novel, a romance, and an epic, as a harlequinade and a tragedy. Indeed, the text is an anatomy of the adventure stor y in the impost of world classic accounts of the epic hero from Gilgamesh to the Arabian Nights, from the 0dyssey to Beowulf. Although from a formalist position Ishmael is clearly the sole narrator, the tale remains markedly dual-lane in expression that is, the tone, diction, register, and underlying psychology of the account describe deuce radically different modes of experience. Ishmael in his own voice is empirical, democratic, sane, philosophical, comedic small-arm Ahabs discourse 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 common sailor before the mast, and Ahab, the demonic ship captain, in conclusion emerge as disjoined fragment... ... 11 Zizek, 3. 12Zizek, ix. Works Cited Fiedler, Leslie. Love and final stage in the American Novel. NYC Criterion Books, 1960.-----------------. Come Back to the Raft Agin, Huck Honey Partisan Review 15 (19 48) 2 664-71.Freud, Sigmund. purification 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. Black 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. Enjoy Your Symptom NYC Routledge, 1992.