Melville's Use Of Greek Mythological Allusions In Moby Dick

167 Words1 Pages
Another mythological allusion Melville uses in Moby Dick is another of Greek mythology about the Fates. The Fates are the three goddess who control life and human destiny, their names are Clotho, the one who gives life to one by spinning the thread of life; Lachesis, the one who determines the length one will live by the length of the thread; and Atropos, the one that determines how one will die by cutting the thread. Ishmael makes his boarding the Pequod clear when he says, “I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way…”(Melville 15). The structure of the sentence makes it clear