Moby Dick Research Paper

Herman Melville Author Herman Melville who is considered one the great American authors, wrote during the romanticism period. Particularly, in his titled Moby Dick written in 1851. We can see the evidence of the characteristics, themes and style identified with the romanticism movement which was extant, in American letters between 1800 and 1865. As a representative of such movement, Herman Melville then remains one of the most identifiable and iconic writers of his time Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819. As a boy, he had a troubled childhood and his family was so poor that his education was occasional. When he became an adult, he sign in as a cabin boy with the trade ship St. Lawrence in 1839. After completing his round to Liverpool,

That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.... Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon