Primitive Beginnings in Herman Melvilles Moby Dick

Primitive Beginnings in Herman Melvilles Moby Dick Among the numerous themes and ideas that author Herman Melville expresses in Moby Dick, one of the less examined is the superiority of the primitive man to the modern man. As an undertone running through the entire book, one can see in Moby Dick the same admiration of the noble savage that is so prevalent in Melvilles earlier tales of the simple and idyllic life of the cannibals, even though the focus has been shifted to the dangers of seeing things from only one point of view and to the struggle between good and evil. Before proceeding to a discussion of how Melville glorifies primitive man in Moby Dick, a working definition for the term must be agreed†¦show more content†¦what is called savagery. When a whaling ship leaves port, it leaves the civilized world and plunges into the world of the primitive, where the sea rolls as it rolled five thousand years ago and wild, furious nature, unmodulated by the influence of man, holds complete sway. (see Chapter 58: Brit) There, the ship shares many characteristics with a nomadic tribe, roving across the prairies in search of great beasts to hunt and kill. These ship-tribes are few and far between, and when they meet, it is an opportunity to tell stories and to exchange any useful knowledge they may have gathered. In addition, the whale hunt itself provides a metaphor for the hunt that took up most of the primitive mens time and provided them with their sustenance. When the harpooners all hurl their harpoons at a whale, the image of c avemen hurling spears at a mammoth is vividly conjured up. The virtues required of the prehistoric mammoth-hunters are also observed in the whalemen; both must have courage, perseverance, and solidarity. So, when Melville devotes several chapters to an exposition of the glories of whaling, attempting to endow the whaling industry with a mythology befitting a fundamental activity of manShow MoreRelatedEssay on Reading Moby-Dick as Ethnic Allegory2752 Words   |  12 PagesReading Moby-Dick as Ethnic Allegory At a time when images of the white settler conquering the savage frontier were prevalent in antebellum America, depictions of racial polarization and, alternately, co-existence among different ethnic groups had already begun to find expression in various artistic mediums, from painting to literature. Today more than ever, such works continue to elicit critical re-examinations where race relations, colonization, and literary representation are concernedRead MoreThemes in Green Grass Running Water817 Words   |  4 PagesAmericans eventually adopts a name from these White works. The four characters come from works by white writers for white audiences that feature Native American characters: Robinson Crusoe from the eponymous novel by Daniel Defoe, Ishmael from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Hawkeye from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, and The Lone Ranger, the titular hero of radio and television serials. King furthers this theme of cultural conflict by demonstrating the power that popular culture has in shapingRead MoreLogical Reasoning189930 Words   |  760 Pagesbackground knowledge to disambiguate, then someone is going to have to instruct it to do all the information processing that is done unconsciously by us humans, who are naturally intelligent. In the 1950s, when the field of computer science was beginning, many computer designers and programmers made radically optimistic claims about how they were on the verge of automating language understanding and language translation. The U.S. government was convinced, and it invested a great amount of money