An Analsis on the Unique Features of Captain Ahab in Moby.doc

An Analysis on the Unique Features of Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick Melvilles ravaged and fanatic captain, Ahab, is one of the few American contributions to that handful of resonant names — like Hamlet, or Lear, or Oedipus — that seem to sum up some fact of human potential and to bare the contours of some exemplary human fate. Melville equips his obsessive with the heros unforgettably distinguishing name — “He’s Ahab, boy”(Chap. 16), Captain Peleg rightly underlines. He equips him with the heros special linguistic register — the gorgeously musical metaphorical language Ahab seems less to speak than to declaim or sing. He equips him with the hero’s magnanimity, his outsized capacities to will, do, feel, and suffer: Ahab wills not as we will but as a locomotive drives along a track; Ahab sobs not as we sob but with the superior woe of “a heart-stricken moose” (Chap. 36). And he equips him with the heros memorable story or adventure — in this case, to hunt and to be destroyed by hunting the great white whale. Ahab is the most complex figure in Moby-Dick. He has alternating personality, righteous and humane but also vicious and tyrannical. He is not a perfect respectable hero, but he is far from a total wicked man [3]. His individualism is a representative of his time and place. Ahab’s Character: His Monomania and Humanity The monomania and humanity is two contradictory aspects of the captain. Now an analysis on these aspects of Ahab will be carried out to show the figure in two different ways. ?Ahab’s character is critical to the story element in that without him, the reader could not really experience the insaneness of the voyage and the cruelty of the mission that they have set out to accomplish. However, many people would think of “madness” when they are asked for only one word to summarize Ahabs character. For madness is considered as “the final expression of his nobility and the furthest thrust of his sea instinct. He once says, They think me mad — Starbuck does; But