Cecilia
Moby Dick
What can I
say it is one of those books that is so rich that it would take years to
explain and even then the way it is understood will keep changing as time
passes. Dr. Campbell said today that it
would be 20 years and Moby Dick would be look and analyzed from the aspect of
animal mistreatment. I would like to
address the idea that a person cannot find oneself when you are driven by one
emotion. It can destroy you and will
only deliver your death. When you face a
blank space you will only know that your journey is at an end.
Ahab a
character in the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville has inner daemons that he
constantly fights with. He is the
corporal representation of madness and obsession. He has a prosthetic stub of steel that he has
in place of a leg. This shows that
nothing will stop him from his revenge and that is to destroy the beauty of an
animal whose fault is creating a substance that many whalers seek. Ahab wants to destroy goodness the wild pure
thing that roams the seas as if he were the lord of the seas. The sperm whale though it may be a pack
animal can travel by himself. Like Ahab
Moby Dick is a loner who makes his own path and those who follow meet their
doom.
Ahab tries
to find who he is but fails. He is blinded
by obsession and revenge. With the death
of Moby Dick he thinks he could finally be himself. What he doesn’t realize is that killing Moby
Dick is killing himself because Moby Dick has become a big part of his life
almost the substance. The substance that
keeps Ahab semi sane through the voyage is Moby Dick. Without him Ahab looses who he is. Why when he met his for head with the whale
he felt no connection? That was because
he could not see past any ones outside since we had been blind for many years
that he himself could not recognize goodness.
His loose
of sight brings his death!
If Moby-Dick hadn't killed Ahab, what do you think Ahab's life would have been like?
ReplyDeleteThat's a big problem with monomania: when one becomes so intently focussed on one thing, other aspects of their life take backseat. He didn't care about the lives of his crew. He didn't care about the life of himself. He didn't care about the well-being of his wife or any of the families of his crew. All he cared about was exacting revenge on the leviathan responsible for taking his leg.
ReplyDeleteHe replaced his leg with whale ivory. This served as a gruesome reminder, for every time he saw his new leg, he saw the whale. So in a way, he became one with the pain.
This monomania led to his death, and the death of his crew...except for Ishmael, of course, who survived... somehow.