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Melville’s novels represent the author’s bleak view of the world in which he lived. It is at once Godless and purposeless. Man in this universe lives a meaningless life. His works focus on two major themes: alienation and “rejection and quest”. Of the most published novels, Moby Dick proves to be the best. It is regarded as the first American prose epic. The story is simple, about Ahab, a man madly in chase of the whale which has sheared off his leg on board his ship, Pequod.
It is known that Melville underwent some sort of spiritual revolution under the influence of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. In mid-July he read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse and was electrified by it. Afterwards, he decided to transform Moby Dick into the sort of book that would meet his new poetics—to write a book full of the blackness ten times black he so admired in the work of his kindred spirit Hawthorne. Melville transformed the hunt for whales and for the great white whale into a fictional world within which he could probe into the deepest profundities of the universe and the human soul, all of which were embodied in various symbols.
One of the striking traits of Moby Dick is the author’s use of symbolism to express his thoughts and opinions, which is one of the reasons for its popularity, so it is quite necessary to analyze the symbolic meaning of the novel. In this thesis, I will give a detailed description of symbolism in Moby Dick from which readers can understand the novel well and appreciate the permanent artistic charm and immeasurable literary value. From the further levels, they will have a deep thinking of the relationship between human being and nature and learn to be harmonious with our lovely nature. And this is also the eternal theme of this novel.
II. Moby Dick and Symbolism
2.1 Research on Moby Dick
Herman Melville’s longest novel Moby Dick is recognized as one of the great masterpieces in the 19th century American literature history. This novel is generally regarded as a detailed account of human being’s encroachment on nature.
Like any great masterpiece, Moby Dick cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. From the early critical reception to the modern criticism, Moby Dick has been studied in various perspectives by Melville scholars due to its significance in Melville’s literary career and its rich implication. Melville’s critics generally agree that like Hawthorne, Melville is a master of symbolism. In English and American critical circles, throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the focus of literary studies on Moby Dick shifted to issues of race, class, culture and gender. There are, however, few books dealing with symbolism in Moby Dick. Such analyses are scattered among different critical articles on Moby Dick.
Chase remarks that:“In discussing allegory and symbol, Moby Dick is in one sense a symbolic poem”.(Chase 100) In the novel, it is not difficult to find some beautiful chapters like“The Funeral”, “The Pacific” and “The Symphony”. They are sheer lyrics. Although few books dedicated to the analysis of symbolism in Moby Dick can be found, there are pieces of analyses dealing with the topic. Mukhtar Ali Isani wrote an article about the fire symbolism; Chase, Richard pointed out in his The American Novel and Its Tradition that the White Whale hints various meanings and emphasized that it is the symbol of nature. As for the researches of Moby Dick in China, what we may find is that by December 2007, there are 92 essays commenting on Moby Dick in CNKI(China’s National Knowledge Infrastructure), including 77 periodical articles and 15 M.A. Dissertations. And some of them are about its symbolic meaning. Chen Qiuhong in his Cultural Interpretation of the Symbolic Meaning of Moby Dick said that from the point of nature, Moby Dick was nature itself.
There has been a general increase in the number of articles on Melville’s Moby Dick since the year 2000. Only five periodical articles were published in 2000. The number fluctuated slightly in the ensuing years, but the average number per year remained 5. However, 2006 and 2007 witnessed a surprising leap in Moby Dick research. The sudden rise was perhaps due to the fact that in the new century more and more modern theories and academic perspectives, especially eco-criticism has been introduced to China. Among the 37 periodical articles, 15 were written from the perspective of eco-criticism. Meanwhile, the number of M.A. Dissertations has undergone a stead increase. In general, the startling growth in the number of Moby Dick articles proves that Moby Dick has become a research focus, attracting more and more researchers to join in the hot debate. It is also discovered that the domestic research on symbolism in Moby Dick mainly focuses on major symbols of the novel, such as the White Whale, the ship and the major character Ahab. And I will give a detailed analysis of the major symbols of the novel in this paper.