Analysis of the Main Figures of Moby Dick I. Introduction 1.1 Introduction of Herman Melville  Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born in New York city on August 1819, and he was a great American writer in Romantic period. He was a descendant of an old rich family. There is a comfortable life for his family until 1830 when his father became bankrupt. Because of that Melville had to leave school and tried all kinds of work to make a living. When all those jobs could not offer him an honorable life he decided to go to sea in 1839. At that time a sailor’s life was uncertain toilsome and dangerous, so Melville experienced one of the most merciless worlds for a man as a whaler and those experience enabled him to see life clearly from the bottom.
    Melville returned home in 1844 and wrote about three sea novels which include Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. The three novels drew from his adventures among the people of the South Pacific islands; Redburn (1849) is a semi-autobiographical novel, concerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors; in White Jacket (1850) Melville relates his life on a United States man-of-war. The most important book of Melville was Moby Dick, which was not understood by his readers of his time. In the 1920s people all around the world raising a revival interest in Moby Dick, which is one of the most dramatic reversals in all literary history. By writing such a book Melville reached the most flourishing stage of his literary creativity. After that Melville becomes, almost overnight, one of the half-dozen major American literary figures of the 19th century. People declared that there is on other figures as commanding as Captain Ahab and no other novels as full of such action, religion, philosophy, detailed information about a way of American life, humor, democratic beliefs, tremendous, variety of style and allusions. The descriptions of the ocean in the novel are vivid and vigorous and the use of language is convincing and impressive, besides the style of Melville in Moby Dick is highly symbolic and metaphorical.24986
1.2 Introduction of Moby Dick
    There is few books in American literature like Moby Dick which has produced such a profound effect upon readers, of which its author could not have dreamed. It is a novel full of fantasy and realism based upon the South Pacific whaling industry. The structure of this novel is simple. The story begins roughly as follows: “Call me Ishmael”. The writer begins from Ishmael, feeling depressed who sought escape through going to sea and at last boarded on a ship, Pequod, the captain of which is Ahab, a man with strong belief and pride. He has only one leg because in his previous voyage one of his another leg was knocked off by a white whale named Moby Dick, because of which, the Captain Ahab decides to find it and kill it. Pequod makes a good catch of whales but Ahab refuses to turn back until he can kill his enemy Moby Dick. Eventually the white whale appears, and the Pequod begins its destined fight with it. On the first day the whale overturns a boat, and on the second day it swamps another. When the third day comes, Captain Ahab and his crew succeed in impaling a harpoon into the white whale, and at the same time the whale carries Pequod along with its doom. All the crew on the ship get drowned, except Ishmael, who survives to tell the story. At last, Moby Dick disappears and nobody knows where it has gone.
   Different people have different point of views about this novel. It might be read as an initiation book about Ishmael, the outcast, finding himself in a world of toilsome work and danger and an unreal world full of speculation and mystery; in addition, it is a fabulous dramatization of the Captain Ahab’s obsessed determination to make revenge on Moby Dick, one particular whale who has previously destroyed his ship and humiliated him by ripping off one of his legs. On surface, the novel seems to focus on the hostility between Captain Ahab and the white whale Moby Dick. But in reality, it is not simply an adventurous book which is full of elaborate odds and romantic sentiments. The clue which runs through the whole book is the deep concerns of our human being’s fate. Moreover, this novel has been so often interpreted in so many ways, symbolically and allegorically, that now we can boldly conclude that the meaning of Moby Dick means almost as many things as it has readers who are deeply involved in the conflicts of life. It is the skilled symbolism used by Herman Melville that makes Moby Dick so popular throughout the world. 《白鲸》主要人物形象分析:http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_18619.html