Why do we as humans seek revenge? Both The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Moby Dick by Hermann Melville include a male character “who is completely consumed by a revenge scheme (Althubaiti)”.
Captain Ahab from Moby Dick and Roger Chillingworth from The Scarlet Letter both feel they have justification for the actions they take while seeking revenge. Ahab has lost his leg while hunting the white whale known as Moby Dick while Chillingworth arrives home after a 2 year captivity with natives to find his wife has had a baby outside of their marriage. Chillingworth does not feel as though Hester, his wife, has had a hersh enough punishment “which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge” for her aside from jail time and public humiliation
(Hawthorne 11.1). The severe punishment she has already received is not enough in his perspective. Captain Ahab sees the whale Moby Dick as a wall blocking him from his life. In his mind, he is unable to move forward until he has killed the whale. Both Characters feel as though they have been wronged and vengeance is the only way to correct it.
The motive resulting in the schemes of the characters “are controversial” in their nature (Kesterson). Ahab’s motive seems to be insanity. Others
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While in Moby Dick the whale is portrayed as evil, Chillingworth is the evil one in The Scarlet Letter. Captain Ahab spends his life attempting to rid the world of the whale. When he gets the chance to kill Moby Dick, he uses human blood on the harpoon and chants prayers in latin. The chants baptize the whale to rid it of its sins. Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter is unsatisfied by Hester’s punishments. His ability to mentally create a better revenge “than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy” shows his terrible intentions as well as his evil nature (Hawthorne 11.1). Both examples show how revenge has changed their views on others as well as how others view