Moby Dick Research Paper

Herman Melville Herman Melville influenced the literature through his masterpiece Moby-Dick. He (Aug. 1, 1819 - 28, 1891) was born into a socially connected New York family and fought for a success that would not be realized during his lifetime. His socialite parents, from his youth did not expect that he would be a religious and intelligent child. In 1839, at the age of 20, Herman traveled his first time across the Atlantic sea as a cabin boy on the merchant ship the St. Lawrence (“Family Background”).
Moby-Dick is the story of the fateful voyage of the Pequod, a whaling ship commanded by the mysterious and obsessive Captain Ahab. Throughout the novel, Ahab relentlessly pursues Moby-Dick, the white whale that years before had taken off his

In the summer of 1847, he added the responsibility of marriage when Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts, agreed to marry Melville for more steady income, he became a regular contributor of reviews and other pieces to a literary journal. Melville also began a third book in 1847 that would become “Mardi, and a Voyage Thither” was rather self-confidently, Melville thought his third book quite different as from Typee and Omoo. It began as another Polynesian adventure, but quickly set its hero in pursuit of the mysterious Yillah, "all beauty and innocence," a symbolic quest that ends in a disaster. Upon its publication in 1847, public and critics alike received it coolly. Covering his disappointment at the book's reception, he quickly wrote Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) in the way expected of him. The critics acclaimed, especially White-Jacket both novels, revealed Melville's growing depression (Mid-Century Popularity

In the past In the US News and World Report appeared an interesting comparison of the mad captain Ahab to the American president George W. Bush. “President Bush is Ahab, the mad captain in Moby-Dick, according to David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Richard Gere of the Hollywood left’s foreign desk” (Leo). There, it is possible to see the change, now the leader of the United States, the leader of those United States which represented Moby Dick more than in former days, has become the dictator, if it was the 1940s. He also has in front of him a very powerful White Whale who has already hurt him. So it is not such a big surprise that at the 150th anniversary of this novel, the story has become a different variety of the historical interpretation of the powerful United States in the 1940s in which a warning for captain Ahab, and now George W. Bush, is included. It is George W. Bush as a Captain Ahab fighting against terrorism. This fight started when he lost his leg, the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September, 2001 (Present Day Moby Dick