Melville: Moby-Dick (1851)

Abstract

In no other work of American literature do the fundamental American questions, about the nature of the self and the world and about the relationship between the self and the world, have the heroic scale and tragic development they have in Moby-Dick. Nor does any other American work, in exploring these questions, submit literary form to such strain. I shall begin my demonstration of these claims by discussing two well-known episodes in the book. They are from ‘The Mast-Head’ and ‘The Quarter-Deck’, two chapters placed one after the other.