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Compare And Contrast Scarlet Letter And Moby Dick

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The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a story about a woman, Hester Prynne, who committed adultery with the reverend, Arthur Dimmesdale, which will not confess his sin. A physician, Roger Chillingworth, takes care of him on the outside, but behind closed doors Chillingworth is keeping Dimmesdale in his pain.Because the man will not confess his sin he tortures himself, which causes physical and mental illnesses. Another American gothic novel, Moby Dick, was writing from the author's, Herman Melville , experience on a whaling ship. The wailing ship’s captain is Captain Ahab. Ahab’s main goal for going on the whaling ship is to kill the whale, Moby Dick. Roger Chillingworth and Captain Ahab are both evil characters with many differences. …show more content…

Roger Chillingworth directs his evil toward Arthur Dimmesdale. He tries to keep Dimmesdale in his misery so that the pain inside of him will fester and it will slowly kill him. Chillingworth’s goal is to keep Dimmesdale in his own pain so it only affects him. While Chillingworth’s evil only affects one person, Ahab’s evil affects the entire shipping crew and everything around the ship. When Ahab decides to only kill Moby Dick, it cuts down all of the crew members paychecks. Also, when Ahab is on the trail to kill Moby Dick he almost destroys the ship in the process. The effect of the evil doing can help show the end result and who it will

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800 Words | 4 Pages

To some this in an unneeded, extraneous line in the story that adds no real substance. To others, this provides insight into the characters of Nurse Ratched and Mr. McMurphy. The white whale refers to Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In Moby Dick, the whale wreaks havoc and is relentlessly pursued by Captain Ahab. In the end it can be argued that Moby, the whale, and the Captain are both defeated, paralleling the story with Nurse Ratched and Mr. McMurphy.

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738 Words | 3 Pages

The characters Connie and Morton both experience victimization first-hand. Both of these characters are targets of abuse, harm, and injury. Morton is the victim not only because of the other father, but also because of his wife. Connie is the victim because of an older man that goes by the name of Arnold Friend. Now let’s take a look at how both Connie and Morton become the victim.

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708 Words | 3 Pages

In the book The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the transgressions of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale and the consequences of adultery and revenge. Roger Chillingworth, a physician and the secret spouse of Hester, torments Dimmesdale to his death. There is a substantial amount of evidence that Chillingworth’s sin is greater than the minister’s; but in reality, Dimmesdale has committed the greater sin. The common perspective is that Chillingworth commits a tremendous sin by torturing Arthur Dimmesdale to the verge of death.

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494 Words | 2 Pages

Ahab doesn’t even care if he makes it back to his family. The final time he sends everyone after Moby Dick just as Elijah says, everyone but one dies. Ishmael lived out of multiple people on the ship. When Ahab risks everything just for revenge on the whale, he is either crazy or evil… Well he is both.

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700 Words | 3 Pages

Even though he kept the man suffer, his action also shows positive impact toward his wife and Pearl later on. Regardless, Roger Chillingworth is mostly fill with evilness desiring to have revenge on his

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301 Words | 2 Pages

Lastly, Melville uses animals of the sea to hide his true ambitions of truth. He is able to illustrate a world governed by the sea and where man is

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489 Words | 2 Pages

The safety of the crew is at times jeopardized because of this one desire. Captain Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick causes him to lash out at crew members and respect is

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1729 Words | 7 Pages

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is one of the most famous and influential novels written in American literature. The story takes place in the seventeenth century in the Puritan settlement of Boston where a young woman named Hester Prynne is punished after having a daughter with a man who was not her husband. Though, instead of hanging Hester they spare her life because of her beauty. She is then shunned and forced to wear a scarlet “A” (for adultery) on her breast for the rest of her life, while, the “unknown” man who Hester had an affair with moves on with a guilt-filled life. The novel is a classic romance with it’s countless symbols tossed throughout the book.

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1120 Words | 5 Pages

While Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter certainly tells a compelling story, the novel also acts as a psychological study of sorts; delving deep into the minds of complex and troubled individuals. Each main character; Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth, is confronted with their own predicament to which they all react distinctively. Their responses to Hester and Dimmesdale’s sin are constructed by their own distorted perceptions of the world due to the mental illnesses they are all troubled by. Each character’s method of retaliating, coping, or succumbing indirectly reveals the illogical patterns within their mind. In Hawthorne’s

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1458 Words | 6 Pages

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a famous American author from the antebellum period, notices the emphasis on individual freedoms in the works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists during his residency in the Brook Farm’s community. In response to these ideas, Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter, a historical novel about Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale’s lives as they go through ignominy, penance, and deprecation from their Puritan community to express their strong love for each other. Their love, even though it is true, is not considered as holy nor pure because of Hester past marriage to Roger Chillingworth, and thus Hester gained the Scarlet Letter for being an adulterer. Hawthorne utilizes biblical allusions, such as the stories of

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684 Words | 3 Pages

One of the main characters in Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick, is a middle aged man named Starbuck. Starbuck is the first mate of Captain Ahab on a whaling ship. Captain Ahab becomes obsessed with having revenge of a White Whale he nicknamed Moby-Dick because it took his leg on a previous whaling excursion. Starbuck realizes that Ahab has gone insane and that chasing after the dream of capturing Moby-Dick will have severe repercussions on the crew. He tries to get the rest of the crew to see that Ahab has gone mad and that if they continue to follow him they will all end up dead.

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886 Words | 4 Pages

Melville’s life had a great impact on the story Moby Dick. In the same way, he had a bad leg on one of his journeys, he creates Captain Ahab with a broken leg. Primarily, by reading Shakespeare’s plays he creates the setting and language of the novel. In the same manner, he uses his dramatic technique in creating Ahab as a tragic hero villain.

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497 Words | 2 Pages

As the journey goes on the crew ends up in the freezing waters of the Arctic, because Captain Ahab insists on chasing the Moby Dick. By this point, the barrels that stored the oil are rotted and all the oil they collected is now wasted. Ahab is keeping the crew “hostage” until they kill Moby Dick. They finally see Moby Dick and Captain Ahab kills himself and all the crew while trying to kill the white whale. Captain Ahab was a selfish obsessed man who only looked out for

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1731 Words | 7 Pages

There are many whales in the sea, but this particular whale called Moby Dick is the desirable catch for the whalers and captain due to its legendary proportions. In the novel, Moby Dick, it offers an allegorical story of humanity’s dangerous search for meaning. The monstrous, white whale represents that “meaning” humans have been hunting for their entire lives, but at the end one will discover that one can do so much but still end up not finding their answer. The entire plot to Moby Dick is directed towards the final confrontation between Ahab, his crewman and the White whale. At the end, the whale wins the fight and the rest of the crew on ship all die, demonstrating the fact that the whale cannot be defeated, hence signaling how the laws

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975 Words | 4 Pages

However, despite being his most famous novel, only three thousand copies of the book were sold while Herman was still living(“Herman Melville”). By the 20th century the novel was reborn as literary analysts began to comment on the excellence presented by the story and many copies began selling as it became a must for high school curriculums all over the United States As one digs deep into Moby Dick, one would get the feeling of how life on the high seas was and the excitement that a sailor’s life was comprised of. Herman wrote the novel in first person point of view as a sailor on the whaling ship just as he had been during his voyages. This helps to add reality to a story that was somewhat unbelievable to people when it was first published.

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