Typee And Redburn Essay

The Possibility of Resistance against Oppressive Social Codes in Herman Melville’s Typee and Redburn Environments with equality shape minds in a beneficial way. Healthy environments where people treat each other with dignity can create a happy society. However, an oppressive society that adheres to a system of double standards will cause a feeling of negativity amongst people. When people are forced to deal with rejection and ignorance from others they feel a lasting sense of negativity that can follow them for the rest of their lives. Herman Melville focuses on these topics and shows us how these negative influences impact people. Melville discusses how to deal with these issues and how to survive them. His two famous books, Typee and Redburn, deal with these social issues. Both of the stories take us on a journey overseas, where the protagonists are introduced

Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life; the necessity of doing something for myself, united to a naturally roving disposition, had now conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor” (43). Here his father’s death puts pressure on him to work as a sailor. The oppressive society forces him to leave his comfort zone, his home, his class, and makes him helpless and unprotected. When he leave his home, he thought everything would be fine as he dreamt as a child. He says, “Yes, I will go to sea; cut my kind uncles and aunts, and sympathizing patrons, and leave no heavy hearts but those in my own home, and take none along but the one which aches in my bosom. Cold, bitter cold as December, and bleak as its blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed; and such was I, with the warmth of me flogged out by adversity” (52). The hardship in the village and the poverty make him a “misanthrope.” He hates his environment and he wants to leave the village. He desires a welcoming world full of