This sort of thing is just what gave the "Transcendentalist" movement its name. Transcendentalism was a political, philosophical, and literary movement that emerged in America in the mid-nineteenth century with advocates like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Proponents felt that spiritual transcendence was a more valuable form of experience than physical or strictly intellectual pursuits, and could be achieved in part through solitary, meditative communion with Nature. And then, suddenly, the Pequod needs an extra life-buoy, and Queequeg offers up the coffin as something that can easily be transformed into one.
Something made for a dead body is going to be turned into something that keeps a man from becoming a dead body. For Ishmael, it represents life from death, life out of death. Heck, Queequeg might as well be in the coffin, considering that he dies at the same moment that Ishmael is saved.
Hmm…life out of death…that sounds like resurrection , which definitely has some religious symbolism. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. If at stretches it felt dull, unending, other passages were hilarious. Like Whitman, this book contained multitudes. Whiteness, in particular, was everywhere. Moby Dick is about many things, and racism is very much one of those, yet it is rarely discussed as a book about race.
And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow. He begins with the idea of whiteness as beauty, creating an enormous list of objects and ideas from around the globe that seem to presume that whiteness is related to royalty, power, and goodness—the basic assumption, of course, that white European colonists used to justify dehumanizing black and brown peoples.
Whiteness, then, for all the associations he has mentioned, is frightening at its core. Whiteness has a grave-pallor to it, a signifying of something terrible.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
All the world is a chill, meaningless snow—blanketed, perhaps, with the little quilts and fires we invent to give life some sort of meaning, but ultimately worthless in of itself. A striving for connection? A certain secular religiosity.
No matter, the whales are doomed. They form a circle, circles within circles, like a clockwork mechanism in fin and tale, and the smaller boats lower into the water and go about their true business, the killing of whales, darting the weaker ones, taking advantage of mammalian affinities and loyalties, maiming as many as possible. And it is within this shoal that Starbuck and Queequeg and Ishmael find their boat inadvertently pushed into the very innermost circle, what Ishmael compares to a valley lake, "the enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion," and it is this moment in Moby-Dick that I reflect on most often, that living wall of whales and the pastoral scenes glimpsed beneath.
All this violence, all this blood, and yet, for a moment, small tame cows and calves, "the women and children of this routed host," visit the side of the unexpected boat and accept pats and scratches from Queequeg and Starbuck. They are the innocent, the cherished, the ones being protected by the larger herd from "learning the precise cause of its stopping. A bit of Gulfweed, that's what they are -- what we are. It is that moment of calm and metaphysical understanding, the divide between the spirit and the body and the near constant human attempt to bring those polarities together, that plus the sentimentality of the scene, of these mothers and children, these whales, resigned yet not uncaring, making due with the cruelty of the distant stars, just slays me.
We, the killers, seek meaning in the depths even as the depths look back and see in their murderers nothing but an inconsequential speck. And deeper still in this clear iris we spot the moments following birth where the line of umbilical apes the harpooner's hemp, and yet even deeper we spot actual Leviathan lovemaking and where, like a precursor to David Foster Wallace, we are given a curious footnote, one of many.
We, like Ishmael, nature's disinherited, peer into this wide end of a telescope and see the up-close secrets of the faraway world. Or so pronounces Ishmael, once again insisting on that individualistic spyglass view, the small and large relating directly back to him.
And do we believe him here? I certainly don't. And what is "eternal mildness" anyway? Ishmael, as befitting his name, is desperate for kinship wherever he can steal it. But I understand the impulse, the desire; I feel in my bones what he seeks in this watery world: something solid to grasp even if it's just a metaphor. And lest we luxuriate in this sweet view for long, Melville quickly turns the scene into arguably the most existentially brutal in the entire book, straight outta Cormac: an injured whale with a line of rope tangled around its tail, the end terminating in a razor-sharp cutting-spade, breaks free from one of the boats and begins to flail about the herd in terrible agony, sending this keen blade crashing into the water, wounding and murdering his fellow comrades.
The Pequod Named after a Native American tribe in Massachusetts that did not long survive the arrival of white men and thus memorializing an extinction, the Pequod is a symbol of doom. Moby Dick Moby Dick possesses various symbolic meanings for various individuals. Previous section Motifs. Popular pages: Moby-Dick. Take a Study Break.
0コメント