Transilvania University of Braov Faculty of Languages and Literatures R.E.

(group B) , year 3

The avatars of Ahab

Supervisor senior lecturer: Oana Prnu

Student: Potoroac Elena

Braov 2014

Sentence outline:

Abstract (page) Keywords (page ) Motto (page)

Introduction (page ) Content:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Moby-Dick a theoretical background Ahab as a captain Ahab as a heretic Ahab as a revengeful Ahab as a demon The metamorphose of Ahab

Conclusion (page ) Abstract:

Keywords:
2

Introduction:

Content:

1. Moby-Dick a theoretical background Herman Melville, the author of this book had the sea beside him since he was 19. His interest in sailors lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages. Later he called this experience, my Harvard and my Yale ( Peter B. High, An outline of American literature, 1986 : 52). This statement maintains the idea that the experience on the sea was an important source of inspiration for his creation. Moby-Dick is the Melvilles masterpiece, a story of the whaling ship Pequod and its ungodly, god-like man Captain Ahab (Contents American literature revised edition, 1992:39). This work is a realistic adventure novel which contains a series of meditations on the human condition. The story is more than a simple sea adventure it may be also a search for the truth. Ahab searches obsessively the white whale because this animal is the only truth for him and Ishmael is searching for his initiation. Although Melvilles novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature however beautiful remains alien and potentially deadly. Moby-Dick the great white whale is an inscrutable cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. The novel is modern in its to be selfreferential or reflexive. In other words, the novel it is about itself. The voyage of the whaling ship Pequod was a symbolic voyage.

2. Ahab as a romantic hero Captain Ahab, the central character, is a grand, ungodly, God-like man. He is torn between his humanity and his desire to destroy the white whale. The two sides, the light and the dark fight each other Ahab. The dark side wins. To Ahab, Moby-Dick is part of a universal mystery which he hates, because he cannot understand it. When Ahab finds the whale and attacks him his ship is destroyed. Ahab himself is pulled down into the sea to his death. Ahab is an atypical captain because he does not have a normal communication with his seconds mates who feel afraid of him. Ahab has his own cage on the board and for there he doesnt appear very often. He acts with superiority and his image is like a demigod. He wants to manipulate the people on the board and the destiny. Ahab is led by a malefic power which grows obsessively inside him. His obsession has a name, and it is Moby-Dick, the white whale. Peter Thorslev gives a definition of a Byronic hero in 1962: The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has many dark qualities. With regard to his intellectual capacity, self-respect, and hypersensitivity, the Byronic hero is "larger than life," and "with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his certainty of self-identity, he loses also the status of [a traditional] hero" (Thorslev 187). The protagonist, Captain Ahab should be accounted a Byronic hero according to Thorslevs categorization of a Romantic hero.