Moby Dick Unlucky Quotes

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The Unwitting Vehicle for Evil in Moby Dick



My opinion about symbolism in the book Moby Dick is a patchwork of the "Evil Captain" theory and the "Nothingness" theory. In this theory chance and circumstance cause an unlucky (as opposed to ill-fated) captain to become the unwitting vehicle for evil. It is not his fault, he is driven to it by simple bad luck, and so evil is created out of nothingness, and then disappears from whence it came. The whale represents nothing, Starbuck represents nothing, Pip only serves to represent the madness that would have overtaken Ahab had he not invented an evil whale to blame his leg on, and most importantly Ishmael represents God, or the truth, or something I haven't thought up a name for yet. …show more content…

Sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters were quite simply put to the ax and cut short as if Herman changed his mind upon further contemplation. At first I thought that Herman had A.D.D. but soon I figured that he was playing the old trick on us. That is, he was intentionally being non-descript in order for everyone to interpret the book in a different way (its such a common trick now that I look back, but it really had me for a while). In the beggining the quote reads, "Whales in the sea, Gods will obey," as if Moby Dick was beyond a force of nature, a tool of consummate evil, but by the end the book the quote reads normal, "Whales in the sea, God's will obey" (notice the possessive apostrophe missing in the first one?[thank you for misquoting]). An example of this type of contridiction of ideas occurs between pages 197 and the last …show more content…

Soon (about three pages into the chapter actually) I realized that Herman was just trying to incite hate. If he had wanted sympathy he would have brought this through the voice of Ahab. Today we (belive we) are very race conscious and (believe that) we are less prone to hate something just because of its color, but in Herman's day (1851)it would be perfectly acceptable to use a ploy like this. Of course, the very fact that he is trying to do this now is pretty much proof he's going to change his mind and write something contradictory by the end. By the end he's writing things

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