The Symbolic Interpretations in Moby-Dick

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Melville is one of the American Romanticism writers in the Nineteenth Century. His Moby-Dick has so complex meanings that it is not easy to understand what the author suggestions in this work. Within the framework of Moby-Dick Melville has constructed "a romance, a tragedy, and a natural histroy."
In this symbolic interpretations in Moby-Dick I am interested in the research the symbolic meanings that the followings suggest: Ahab and his Egoism, Moby Dick and his whiteness, sea, and the another various objects around Pequod and its crew.
Melville creates a foolish hero, Captain Ahab, who has a hard conflict with a huge sea monster-the white sperm whale. In the description of Ahab's character Melville takes the alienation and love, and the isolation and strong passion which is destructive, violent, hatefullness, and the egoistic. When the egoistic inclination is very strong, it comes to the solipsistic Ego. Melville describes in Moby-Dick Ahab as the solipsistic Ego who is caught in the strong monomaniacal pride: "In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride."
Moby-Dick is a symbol of more things in the universe rather than any specific one. In the chapter 42, 'The Whiteness of the Whale,' the various meanings, symbols, usenesses and historic backgrounds of the colour White, are described in detail. "Meditation and water are wedded for ever." This is Melville's philosophical conception on the view of life and sea. Ishmael, the narrator of the story, discusses his reasons for going to the sea: "The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two therefloated into my inmost soul, endless procession of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air."
"Melville's Pequod is symbolic for the life of mankind as a whole." It is a microcosm in which the mankind's woyage is doing through space and time. And in this novel the many contrast images are showed: warm and cold, paganism and Christianity, life and death, good and evil, and fast and loose.
Moby-Dick is a symphony: every resource of language and thought, fantasy, description, philosophy, natural history, drama, broken rhythms, blank verse, imagery, symbol, is utilized to sustain and expand the great theme of the American romanticism novel.