Herman Melville (1819-1891):代表作：Moby-Dick. Billy Budd. Typee. Omoo. Mardi. Redburn. White Jacket. Pierre. Bartleby, the Scrivener. Benito Cereno. The Confidence-Man. Pequod.
Herman Melville is best-known as the author of his mighty book, Moby-Dick, which is one of the world’s greatest masterpieces. Like Hawthorne, Melville is a master of allegory and symbolism. (隐喻和象征大师)
Typee. Omoo. Mardi, which drew from his adventures among the people of the South Pacific islands; Redburn is a semi-autobiographical novel, concerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors; in White Jacket Melville relates his life on a United States man-of-war. Of all these sea adventure stories, Moby-Dick proves to be the best. By writing such a book Melville reached the most flourishing stage of his literary creativity.
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” is a short story strikingly symbolizing the loneliness and anonymity and passivity of little men in big cities. The Confidence-Man, in which the author uses the Confidence-man in successive guises to explore the paradoxes of belief and the optimisms and hypocrisies of American life.
However, the purpose of Melville’s fictional tales, exotic or philosophical, is to penetrate as deeply as possible into the metaphysical, theological, moral, psychological and social truths of human existence.
Moby-Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic (美国第一部散文体史诗). It is difficult to read because much of the talk in the novel is sailor’s talk and much of the language is purposely old-fashioned and Elizabethan. But Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure, considering that Melville is a great symbolist. It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man’s deep reality and psychology.
The white whale, Moby-Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable, malignant, and beautiful as well. For the character Ahab, however, the white whale represents only evil. (白鲸象征着自然，复杂，深不可测，也很美丽。但对埃哈布来说，白鲸则代表着邪恶。)
Symbolism is not the only way, in which Melville has articulated, shaped, and presented the mighty theme of the book, Melville’s great gifts of language, invention, psychological analysis, speculative agility, and narrative power are fused to make Moby-Dick a world classic.
关于《白鲸》
Moby-Dick is one of the few books in American literature that has produced an exciting effect upon readers, of which its author could not have dreamed. It a mixture of fantasy and realism based upon the South Pacific whaling industry; it might be read as an initiation story about Ishmael, the outcast, finding himself in a real world of hard work and danger and an unreal world of speculation and
mystery; moreover, it is a fabulous dramatization of Ahab’s obsessed determination to revenge himself in the pursuit of one particular whale who has previously destroyed his boat and humiliated him by ripping off one of his legs.
《白鲸》的主题思想和象征手法
Moby-Dick, the first American prose epic, is about Ahab, a man with an obsession to kill the whale which has crippled him, on board his ship in chase of the big whale, but it turned out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man, deep reality and psychology. Symbolism is the important means for the theme.
Different people on board the ship are representations of different ideas and different social and ethnic groups; facts become symbols and incidents acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truth. The white whale, Moby-Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable, malignant, and beautiful as well. For the character Ahab, however, the white whale represents only evil. Moby-Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind. Ahab wills the whole crew on the Pequod to join him in the pursuit of the big whale so as to pierce the wall, to root out the evil, but only to be destroyed by evil, in this case, by his own consuming desire, his madness. For the author, Moby-Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable and ambivalent, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain a search, not a discovery, of the truth.
对三种人来说，白鲸象征着不同的意义：
1. To Ahab, the whale is either an evil creature itself or the agent of an evil force that controls the universe, or perhaps both.
2. To Ishmael, the whale is an astonishing force, an immense power, which defies rational explanation due to a sense of mystery it carries. It is beautiful, but malignant at the same time. It also represents the tremendous organic vitality of the universe, for it has a life force that surges onward irresistibly, impervious to the desires or wills of men.
3. as to the reader, the whale can be viewed as a symbol of the physical limits that life imposes upon man. It may also be regarded as a symbol of nature, or an instrument of God’s vengeance upon evil man. In general, the multiplicity and ambivalence of the symbolic meaning of the whale is such that it becomes a source of intense speculation, an object of profound curiosity for the reader.
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