The American Novel and Its Tradition

In many works of art such as Shakespearian and Greek tragedies, character has been many a time been blamed for the destiny that is ultimate for a character. These characters usually have a fatal flaw or a great heart that inevitably lead them to their deaths or salvation. Thi9s is a device that Melville uses in Moby Dick in the development of several characters.

Ahab, the Pequod's fanatical captain, corresponds to both a primeval and a characteristically contemporary kind of hero. Similar to the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, Ahab suffer has a particular fatal flaw, one he shares with such renowned characters as Faust and Oedipus. His incredible boldness, or hubris, leads him to go against common sense and deem that, similar to a god, he can perform his will and stay invulnerable to the forces of the natural world. He regards Moby Dick as the personification of wickedness on earth, and he hunts the White Whale monomaniacally since he believes it his unavoidable destiny to obliterate this wickedness. According to the (Melville 2009,pp.23) , such a tragic hero "stirs us to sympathy for the reason that, as he is not an wicked man, his calamity is larger than he justified; but he stirs us as well to trepidation, since we are acquainted with comparable potential of faults in our individual lesser and mortal persons."

Dissimilar to the heroes of older tragic writings, on the other hand, Ahab suffers from a mortal flaw that is not essentially inherent but rather it is as a result of injury, in his case both emotional and corporeal, caused by life in an unsympathetic world. He is as much a sufferer as he is an antagonist, and the figurative conflict that he creates connecting himself and Moby Dick drives him toward what he deems a predestined ending (Chase 1980,pp.56).

Ishmael initiates the novel in the opening chapter drifting through Manhattan in the bleakness of November with gloomy thoughts suggestive of nearly suicidal predisposition: pausing in front of coffin houses and following memorial services. His chief reason for going to a maritime profession, he puts forward, is to getaway from this depressive sequence and fixation with death. Ishmael has a tendency to worry and think his way through stuff, going so far as to depict himself as a thinker in The Mast-Head. Ishmael, while ostensibly rejecting the arts, does own up that he is -- or at any rate was at one time -- a poet (Pirner 2007, pp 17). He appears to be a self-taught Renaissance man, excellent at all things yet devoted to nothing. Given the mythic, dreamy characteristics of Moby-Dick, it is conceivably proper that its storyteller ought to be a mystery: not everything in a narrative so reliant on destiny and the apparently mystical needs to make perfect logic.

According to Sealts and Olson (1997, pp.43) Ishmael is a character that Melville builds up as a man who is essentially what everybody should look up to. Though he has suicidal