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The relationship between man and nature has being a frequently discussed topic for centuries. There is a great deal of literary works that are focused on this topic among which Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a great example.
Moby Dick tells a story that Captain Ahab, with his crew, chases a white whale, and finally kills it with the cost of the death of everyone on board except Ishmael who tells us the story. It is a voyage of vengeance for Captain Ahab, one of whose legs was sheared off by Moby Dick the white whale in a previous fight. He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and to inflict his will on the outside world—whether it is the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will. Both are thinkers, the difference being that Ishmael thinks as a bystander, has identified his own state with man’s utter unimportance in nature. Ahab, by contrast, actively seeks the whale in order to assert man’s supremacy over what swims before him as “the monomaniac incarnation” of a superior power. This thesis focuses on the analysis of the relationship between man and nature by the symbolism of the characters.