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

Desire in Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick Moby-Dick describes the metamorphosis of character resulting from the archetypal night sea journey, a harrow account of a withdrawal and a return. Thus Ishmael, the lone survivor of the Pequod disaster, requires three decades of voracious reading, spiritual meditation, and philosophical reflection before recounting 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 professional alike absorb reached consensus respecting the texts massive and heterogeneous structure. Moby Dick, for all its undeniable heuristic treasures, remains a taxonomists nightmare. For Melvilles complex narrative is an doubt 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 classic accounts of the epic hero from Gilgamesh to the Arabian Nights, from the 0dyssey to Beowulf. Although from a formalist perspective Ishmael is clearly the sole narrator, the tale remains markedly divide in expression that is, the tone, diction, register, and underlying psychology of the account describe two radically different modes of experience. Ishmael in his own voice is empirical, democratic, sane, philosophical, comedic while 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, 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 Honey zealot Review 15 (1948) 2 664-71.Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Disc ontents. 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 picture 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.