Symbolism in Moby Dick
The sea itself is godly--a source of ideas--the inuitive freedom of man himself. If you've ever studied Plato's sequence of reality, you'll understand the implications. (There is a supreme being; this is the ultimate reality. It exists without the existence of anything else. It is from this being that all ideas come forth. This is the second reality. Each of us is an idea from the supreme being. The third reality is a physical body for the idea. The fourth is participation in the idea, i.e. sitting in the idea "chair".) Melville used the ocean to represent the supreme being/existence that each person strives to rejoin. But there is an unfamiliarity with this discovery that makes the sea dangerous and frightening, just as divine truth is frightening. --I'm using the Bantam Classic edition of the book. All the page numbers I give you are from my edition.-- "If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." (p. 11) "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." (p. 13) "Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not hou
"Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward wordly ties and connexions [sic]?" (p. " MY FAVORITE QUOTE-"Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic oceans at his feet for the visible image of taht deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, up-rising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. 35) beginning with "Let me make a clean breast of it here. 23)--it too describes the mortality and worldliness of the port, as opposed to the immortality of the ocean. that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to deep the open independence of her sea.
Common topics in this essay:
FAVORITE QUOTE-Perhaps,
Bantam Classic,
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Sperm Whale,
Shore Ch,
Try-Works Ch,
Moby Dick,
Mast-Head Ch,
God Read,
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