Comparison between Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea 《老人与海》与《白鲸》中主人公的比较.doc

Comparison between Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea Introduction The relationship between human and nature has being a frequently discussed topic for centries. There are a great deal of literary works that are focused on this topic among which Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea are two great examples. Moby Dick tells a story that Captain Ahab, with his crew, chases a white whale, and finally kills it with the cost of the death of everyone on board except Ishmael who tells us the story. It is a voyage of vengeance for Captain Ahab, one of whose legs was sheared off by Moby Dick the white whale in a previous fight. The Old Man and the Sea is about an old Cuban fisherman Santiago and his battle with a great marlin. For 84 days Santiago does not catch a single fish but he does not feel discouraged. He goes far out into the sea and hooks a giant marlin. A desperate struggle ensues in which Santiago manages to kill the fish and tie it to his boat, only to find that on the way home he has to fight a more desperate struggle with some dangerous giant sharks, which eat up the marlin, leaving only a skeleton. The old man brings it home and goes to bed to dream, almost dead with exhaustion. Eco-criticism, a new branch of literary criticism, made its appearance in the 1990s in the western world. Cheryll Glotfelty gave a definition of Eco-criticism in the preface to his The Eco-criticism Reader---- “It’s the study of the relationship between literature and environment.” ( Glotfelty, C. Fromm, H. 1966: xviii) Glen Love holds that “The most important role that literature plays today is leading people to a thorough understanding of the importance of the nature in a world full of disasters”. In other words, literature should depict the relationship between human and nature and appeal to a harmonious co-existance between them. Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea are both literary works that reflect the relat