I。Introduction

Herman Melville was a splendid writer in American literature in the 19th century, as famous as Nathaniel Hawthorne。 He did not receive due attention during his lifetime but rose to fame in 1920s。 Since then, he was generally accepted as one of the greatest characters in American literature。 William Maugham, a famous British critic, indicated that Herman Melville’s status on literature history had surpassed that of Mark Twain。 His masterpiece, Moby Dick, published in 1851, shocked  the literary world after a span。 It tells the story of the illiberal captain Ahab who are aimed to catch and kill a white whale but finally perishes together with it。文献综述

As a disputable work, Moby Dick did not explode in popularity in the beginning。 Neither its obscurity nor abstruseness catered to the taste and orientation of most critics and readers。 In many people’s eyes, this was somewhat an eccentric novel。 In other word,  even  though  it  was filled with concise words and phrases, it was not a light fiction for extensive aesthetic of most readers。 What’s more, to many  feminists, it was a circumscribed book which did not deserve to be read by virtue of absence of any heroine。 That is to say, the initial development of Moby Dick was fairly unfavorable to some extent。 But gold will glitter forever。 Moby Dick obtained great admiration and praise thirty years after Melville’s death。 It was considered to be “the most luxuriant expression of American imagination” and was regarded as the most eminent work of Herman Melville。

The entire novel starts with death as well as finishes up with death。 The  ending  is  correlated  with its  beginning,  like  a rotative  circle。 The

story line is quite simple: Ishmael recommended himself to serve as the sailor of the Pequod, then followed Captain Ahab to pursue and attack a white whale called Moby Dick, but eventually resulted in submergence of Pequod and its sailors。来`自+优-尔^论:文,网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766-

About this splendid work, a number of critics have made much attempt to the research on various aspects, such as symbolic meaning, the image of the sea, narrative strategy and religious meaning。 Nonetheless, the study on the relationship between humans and the ocean is also of great significance。 Being congenial to this point of view, this thesis means to analyze some problems and the prospect of both commensalism on the ideas of ecologism。

The structure of the thesis is settled as following: in the first part, it gives a brief introduction to the ecologism and some of its ideas about the sea, thus presents the basic idea of the whole thesis。 The second part assumes the contradictory human-ocean relationship in the novel, including the aggression of humans to the ocean and the punishment of nature on human。 The third part reveals the harmonious human-ocean relationship, including humans’ love for the ocean and benevolence of the latter to humans。 At the end of the thesis, the conclusion arises based on what is discussed above。