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,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,Herman Melville,Moby Dick,Herman Melville (1819-1891),Novelist,Poet,Herman Melville,Life Story,Literary Characteristics,Reading,Moby Dick,Life Story,Childhood,Career,Childhood,Birth: New York City; August 1, 1819,Grandson of two Revolutionary War Heroes,Fathers view of his son,Death of father in 1832,Fathers Opinion of Him,“,backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehensionof a docile and amiable disposition”,Career,Various jobs: bank clerk; clerk in a cap and fur store; farmhand; schoolteacher, sailor, whaler,Significant Events,Arrowhead,Clerk in New York Custom house for the last 20 years of his life,Death,in 1891,Significant Events,Going out to sea,Marriage,Friendship with Hawthorne,Favorite Writers,Sea Experiences,“,Cabin boy” of,St. Lawrence,in 1839,Whaler,Acushnet,in 1841,Whaler,Lucy Ann,in 1842,Whaler,Charles & Henry,Seaman on,United States,in 1843,Marriage,1847,Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of Chief Justice of Boston ),Extravagant lifestyle,Writing for money,Friendship with Hawthorne,Meeting Hawthorne in the summer of 1850,Influenced by his black vision,Revising,Moby Dick,Dedicating Moby Dick to Hawthorne,“He will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his disbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other He has a very high and noble nature.”,Favorite Writers,Emerson,Hawthorne,Thomas Carlyle,Shelley,Thomas Browne,Shakespeare,Melvilles Grave,Herman Melvilles Obituary Notices,Melville died at home, of a heart attack, shortly after midnight on September 28, 1891. He was seventy-two years old; his last novel,The Confidence-Man, had been published more than three decades earlier. As the following notices suggest, he had been almost totally forgotten by all but a small group of admirers in Great Britain and the United States. In an article written about a year before his death (included below), columnist Edward W. Bok went so far as to state that most of those who,could,remember Melville in 1890 thought he had died long before.,Melville is buried next to his wife Elizabeth Shaw in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.,Literary Characteristics,Major Works,Features,Typee,(1846),Omoo,(1847),Mardi,(1849),Redburn,(1849),White-Jacket,(1850),Moby-Dick,(1851),Pierre,(1852),The Confidence-Man,(1857),Clarel,(1876),Billy Budd,(posthumous, 1924),Features,Earlier Works, drawing upon his sea experiences, black and white,Later Works, Reconciliation between man and God, living by the rules of this world,Herman Melville Moby Dick Poster:20x30 & 10x15 Moby Dick Posters,Moby Dick,Background Information,Summary,Features,Understanding,Moby Dick,Question,About the Writing of,Moby Dick,Working at his desk all day not eating anything till 4 or 5 oclock,“Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!”,“I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb.”,Self-comparison to a century plant which flowers after 100 years,Structure,135 chapters, Ishmael and,Queequeg,;, Ahab and Moby Dick;, Voyage on the,Pequod,;, Whale and the whaling industry;,The final chase and fight,Summary (I),The narrator Ishmael, feeling depressed, seeks escape by going out to sea on the whaling ship,Pequod,.,The captain is Ahab, the man with one leg.,Moby Dick, the white whale, had sheared off his leg on a previous voyage and Ahab resolves to hunt him to the kill.,Ahab hangs a doubloon on the mast as a reward for anyone who sees the whale first.,The,Pequod,makes a good catch of whales but Ahab refuses to turn back until he has killed his enemy.,Summary (II),Eventually the whale appears, and the,Pequod,begins its doomed fight with it.,1st day: the whale overturns a boat.,2rd day: it swamps another boat.,3rd day: Ahab and his crew manage to plunge a harpoon into it, but the whale carries the,Pequod,along with it to its doom.,All on board the whaler get drowned except Ishmael who survives to tell the tale.,Features,Encyclopedia work,Bleak view (man & nature),Rhythmical prose and poetic power,Consciously literary quality,Three-fold quality,Highly symbolic and metaphorical nature,Non-narrative and periodic chapters,Ambiguity,Colorful language,Moby Dick,as an Encyclopedia,Travel account;,Sea adventure;,Allegory (struggle of good and evil),Whaling legend;,American epic;,Long prose lyric poem;,Romantic novel;,whales and operations of the whaling industry;,Shakespearean tragedy,Bleak View,“,Everlasting Nay” attitude towards life,Alienation,(man / nature / society),Criticism of Transcendentalism (individualism),“Rejection and Quest” (Ishmael),Understanding,Moby Dick,on,Three Levels,A story about whaling adventures which describes realistically the life on the sea,Aiming at presenting the struggle between man and nature through the conflict between Ahab and Moby Dick,Both a story of Ahab and a story of Ishmael who represent the two sides of Melville,D. H. Lawrence on H. Melville,“,He records also, almost beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact”,Last paragraph of chapter one,By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.,Moby-Dick Chapter 41 (Moby Dick),I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical,sympathetical,feeling was in me; Ahabs quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.,For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed.,For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.,It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not,unfrequent,instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.,And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults-not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations-but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.,Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,-as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are,whalemen,as a body,unexempt,from that ignorance and,superstitiousness,hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any,chiselled,hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the,whaleman,is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.,No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the wildest watery spaces, the,outblown,rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed,foetal,suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors,unborrowed,from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.,But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the,whalemen,as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would perhaps-either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty of,whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.,And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists-,Olassen,and,Povelson,-declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuviers, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are struck with the most lively terrors, and often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death. And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of,Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.,So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long,practised,Right,whalemen,to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lances at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.,Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.,One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.,Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.,It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some,whalemen, that the Nor West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland,Strello,mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully,equalled,by the realities of the,whalemen,.,Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some,whalemen,should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in,unensanguined,billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.,But even stripped of these supernatural,surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out-a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high,pyramidical,white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.,The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden,gleamings,.,Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.,Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whales infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.,Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whales direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.,His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas,duellist,at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahabs leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic,morbidness,he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.,The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient,Ophites,of the east reverenced in their statue devil;-Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred whit
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