Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The American ClassicsA Personal Essay$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
The American Classics: A Personal Essay

Denis Donoghue

Print publication date: 2005

Print ISBN-13: 9780300107814

Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013

DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300107814.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM YALE SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.yale.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Yale University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in YSO for personal use.date: 14 April 2021

Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick

Chapter:
(p.55) 2 Moby-Dick
Source:
The American Classics
Author(s):

Denis Donoghue

Publisher:
Yale University Press
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300107814.003.0003

This chapter offers a reading of Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick. It highlights the repetition of Melville's move from literal lines to figurative and from a visible to an invisible pencil in extreme terms in this novel. It discusses an interpretation of the novel as a conflict not essentially between Ahab and the white whale, but between Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab representing totalitarianism and Ishmael representing a type of American democracy.

Keywords:   Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, Ahab, conflict, white whale, Ishmael, totalitarianism, American democracy

Yale Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.