Symbolism in Moby Dick

A detailed Summary of Symbolism in Moby Dick

The sea itself is godly--a source of ideas--the inuitive freedom of man himself. If you've ever studied Plato's sequence of reality, you'll understand the implications. (There is a supreme being; this is the ultimate reality. It exists without the existence of anything else. It is from this being that all ideas come forth. This is the second reality. Each of us is an idea from the supreme being. The third reality is a physical body for the idea. The fourth is participation in the idea, i.e. sitting in the idea "chair".) Melville used the ocean to represent the supreme being/existence that each person strives to rejoin. But there is an unfamiliarity with this discovery that makes the sea dangerous and frightening, just as divine truth is frightening.

--I'm using the Bantam Classic edition of the book. All the page numbers I give you are from my edition.--

"If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." (p. 11)

"But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." (p. 13)

"Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not hou

"...such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being's body." (p. 486)-Talk about Plato!

Read the last third of "The Mast-Head" (Ch. 35) beginning with "Let me make a clean breast of it here...."

"Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven." (p 515)

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but emcompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life." (p. 259-60)

Some common words found in the essay are:
FAVORITE QUOTE-Perhaps, Bantam Classic, , Sperm Whale, Shore Ch, Try-Works Ch, Moby Dick, Mast-Head Ch, God Read,

Approximate Word count = 904
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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Symbolism in Moby Dick

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