Herman Melville's mighty, misty monster: a device of literary art.

Abstract

This thesis on the metaphysical function of the White Whale in Moby-Dick is the outgrowth of preliminary research related to Herman Melville's dramatic technique in the same book -in some particulars, a technique seemingly incohesive with a unity of style. Melville, however, had been accused of lack of unity in his writing before he began composition of The Whale. In fact, his own outright comments, along with other literary methods related to incorporated cohesion in writing, indicate that Melville, an observant, intelligent writer, was aware and calculating in structuring his book. Research then supports a conclusion that in Moby-Dick, Melville's form as well as his major symbol was not, by any means, a matter of chance. In every particular, the dramatic mode in that book seems to be related to the goal of its author, and that goal was to produce "a mighty book." Furthermore, wide critical divergence and polarity of interpretation by the illustrious critics of Melville's major work proved paradoxically to encourage wide reading and at the same time to generally restrict interpretation to primary evidence. For that reason, this work is fundamentally reliant upon Jay Leyda's The Melville Log and upon the novel Moby-Dick itself.