浅析《白鲸》中人与自然的关系
毕业论文关键词：赫尔曼•梅尔文尔；白鲸；人类；自然
Abstract
Herman Melville is not only a great Romanticist in the American literature of history but also an influential figure in the world. Moby Dick, which was published in 1851, is his representative work. The plot of this novel is very simple, yet the meaning behind it is far from simple. It is a story of whale-hunting adventure superficially, which turns out to be a vengeance-seeking voyage. And it is an in-depth spiritual exploration about beliefs, religion, fate and nature with multi-layered meanings. Applying symbolism, Melville depicts a hostile relationship between man and nature, which is spotlighted by the conflict between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. In this novel, the various characters represent natural meanings which convey the intention and attitude of the author about the relationship between man and nature. It reveals the profound theme: human beings should respect and explore nature, and human beings will be doomed to destruction if they are hostile to nature.
Key Words: Herman Melville; Moby Dick; human beings; nature
On the Relationship Between Human Beings and Nature in Moby Dick
Contents
摘 要 i
Abstract ii
I. Introduction 1
II. Symbolism of the Characters 2
2.1 The Symbolism of Ahab 2
2.2 The Symbolism of Ishmael 4
2.3 The Symbolism of Pequod 5
2.4 The Symbolism of Moby Dick 5
III. The Relationship Between Human Beings and Nature 8
3.1 The Impact of Human Beings on Nature 8
3.2 The Impact of Nature on Human Beings 10
IV. Conclusion 12
Bibliography 14
Acknowledgments 15
I. Introduction
Moby Dick is not only a very big book, it is also a peculiarly full and rich one, and from the very opening it conveys a sense of abundance, of high creative power, that exhilarates and enlarges the imagination. This quality is felt immediately in the style, which is remarkably easy, natural and “American”, yet always literary and which swells in power until it takes on some of the roaring and uncontainable rhythms with which Melville audibly describes the sea. The best description of this style is Melville’s own, when he speaks of the “bold and nervous lofty language” (Arvin 10) that Nantucket whaling captains learn straight from nature. We feel this abundance in heroic types like the Nantucket themselves, many of whom are significantly named after Old Testament prophets and kings. For these, too, are mighty men, and the mightiest of them all, Captain Ahab, will challenge the very order of the creation itself. If we start by opening ourselves to this abundance and force, by welcoming not merely the story itself, but the manner in which it speaks to us, we shall recognize in this restlessness, this richness, this persistent atmosphere of magnitude, the essential image on which the book is founded. For Moby Dick is not so much a book about Captain Ahab’s quest for the whale as it is an experience of that quest. This is only to say, what we say of any true poem, that we cannot reduce its essential substance to a subject, that we should not intellectualize and summarize it, but that we should recognize that its very force and beauty lie in the way it is conceived and written, in the qualities that flow from its being a unique entity. In these terms, Moby Dick seems to be far more of a poem than it is a novel, and since it is a narrative epic and a long poem on a heroic theme, rather than the kind of realistic fiction that we know today. Of course Melville did not deliberately set out to write a formal epic; but half-consciously, he drew upon many of the traditional characteristics of epic in order to realize the utterly original kind of novel he needed to write in his time—the spaciousness of theme and subject, the martial atmosphere, the association of these homely and savage materials with universal myths, the symbolic wanderings of the hero, the indispensable strength of such a hero in Captain Ahab. Yet beyond all this, what distinguishes Moby Dick from modern prose fiction, what ties it up with the older, more formal kind of narrative that was once written in verse, is the fact that Melville is not interested in the meanness, the literal truthfulness, the representative slice of life, that we think of as the essence of modern realism. His book has the true poetic emphasis in that the whole story is constantly being meditated and unraveled through a single mind.
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