Moby-Dick
Herman Melville (1851)
“A monomaniac captain drags his crew toward annihilation chasing a white whale that may be God, the Devil, or simply a whale — and Melville makes you feel every fathom of the descent.”
Character Analysis
The most complex narrator in 19th-century American fiction. He gives us only a pseudonym — the biblical outcast — and proceeds to tell us everything and nothing. He is a sailor who reads philosophy; a democratic idealist who watches democracy fail; a man who was swept up in Ahab's madness and survived to think about why. His survival is not earned by heroism — he floats on a coffin. His narration is not reliable — he knows things he could not have witnessed. He is the instrument through which Melville thinks, not through which Melville reports.
Educated, allusive, self-deprecating, occasionally comic. References Shakespeare, the Bible, classical philosophy. Uses sailor's vocabulary fluently. Oscillates between high and low register.