Reviewed by Kevin Farley, Collection Librarian for the Humanities

Hailed in the 20th Century as the Great American Novel, an American Homeric epic, in the 19th Century Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (http://www.melville.org/), was dismissed by critics — and readers — when first published in 1851, sending its author into the depths of despair so thoroughly plumbed by his story itself. Perhaps it took the catastrophe of the American Civil War and the horrors of the First World War, with their brutal lessons in the cruel injustices, the great swathes of death, that humans inflict upon one another, to transform Melville's novel from a mere story of New England whaling (which it never was) into a prophecy of the doom that awaits those who forsake mastery of their own wants and desires for mastery and domination of others, and even of Nature itself. In the character of Ahab, hunting relentlessly for the White Whale, and whose tragic, Biblical name foreshadows the destruction he will bring upon himself and his crew on the fatal voyage of the Pequod, Melville captures the seemingly irremediable disease of modernity: namely, revenge upon Nature (for its lack of concern for humanity), and, born of that revenge, the monomaniacal assertion of Self against the common good. A compendium (or "anatomy," in Melville's terms) of the influences that compose American identity — Puritanism and its paradoxes, the love-hate relationship with Nature, the supremacy of the rights of the individual versus the democratic inclusiveness of the happiness of all — Moby Dick continues to beckon us away from the terra firma of our own selfishness and into the unending flux of myth.

Cabell Library Various Call Numbers and Locations
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