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This thesis considers Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as a textual strategy of possible, alternative models of reading, as well as a text in itself. I approach the text as a drama of interpretations and argue that the individual consciousnesses of different interpreters represent different interpretive strategies, and that these differences suggest distinct structures of community. This approach becomes more focussed in the discussion of Ahab and Ishmael as representatives of two contrasting interpretive possibilities, of "reading" the text as a "pasteboard mask" which conceals a stable identity and single "truth," versus "reading" the text of the "defaced" and hence indeterminate surface of changing "meanings." Each strategy implies a different way of conceiving "space" as the "place" where community is formed, and though critics frequently perceive the ending of Moby-Dick as a paradoxical conflict between these two visionary quests, I suggest that Ishmael's survival presents a possible resolution, where Moby Dick becomes the narrative of filling space with many narratives to create the text Moby-Dick.

Published in 1851, Moby-Dick is audaciously experimental and defiantly unique for its time. Many scholars attribute problematic aspects of the book to this authorial ambition, and for the Melville critic, the figure of Fedallah is one of those problems. This study aims to explore how the Oriental character, Fedallah, operates within the larger world of reading and interpretation in Moby-Dick. Major critics of the past have struggled to reconcile the Parsee’s shadowy essence with the materiality of the whale ship, and have interpreted this figure as an evil force, or often bluntly, a devil. However, like many other subjects in the book, Fedallah evades definition. This thesis explores the idea that Fedallah is not an inconsequential bystander to the action, but a character of significant depth and feeling, and an active participant in the interpolated questing and prophetic narratives that lie at the heart of Moby-Dick.

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There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Inter-related passages from his 1850 Hawthorne and his Mosses and 1851 Moby-Dick provide maps into the formulations of Melville's basic epistemology which allow us to better understand the author's interest in fragmentation, and in turn help us trace the developments of Melville's creative consciousness during the years 1853--1856, the period in which the author produced sixteen works of experimental short prose fiction following the critical failures of his longer romances. Although the study approaches the collected body of sketches as the major shift in the author's stylistic evolution, emphasis is placed on individual texts within the period which mark key shiftings in Melville's ongoing experimentations with modalities of form. A paradigm of tenuous equilibrium without reconciliation is embodied in various image strands throughout the works and will be shown to give shape to the experimental formlessness of Melville's sketches. Collectively, the strands make up Melville's aesthetics of incompleteness.

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2007

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1939. / Map on lining-papers. Published also without thesis note. "The American councl of learned societies has generously awarded from a fund provided by the Carnegie corporation of New York, a grant to assist in the publication of this volume." Vita. Bibliography: p. 497-505.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Robert Sattelmeyer, committee chair; Janet Gabler-Hover, Calvin Thomas, committee members. Electronic text (215 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 10, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-215).