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.

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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.

Herman Melville's Piazza Tales is a collection of short stories which first appeared individually in Putnam's Magazine; subsequently Melville re-edited them, wrote a title story, and had them published as a collection. Hitherto the stories have been analysed individually rather than collectively; this thesis, on the other hand, points out the numerous recurrent features in the tales, and it adduces evidence from the title story to support the view that the collection should be regarded as a unit. This supposition leads to a fresh critical view of the individual tales; it also helps to illuminate Melville's artistic development at a time which shortly precedes his transition from fiction-writing to poetry. After discerning briefly the critical history of the Piazza Tales and the situation which led Melville to adopt the short story as a new medium of writing, this thesis analyses the title story both as a story in its own right and as an introduction to the collection. Since it is Melville's last quest story in prose and is written retrospectively, the nature of the questor's disappointment on the mountain throws a light on the meaning of the collected stories. Thus his retirement to the uninvolved viewpoint from the piazza and the theme of human isolation, captured in the figure of Marianna, emphasize salient features common to the following stories. With these generic features in mind, each story is analysed; the last, chapter evaluates these common characteristics from the viewpoint of Melville's development. Thus, the Piazza Tales not only show inner artistic consistency but appear as an important milestone in Melville's literary career, as an important link between Pierre and The Confidence Man, after which Melville gave up publishing fiction altogether. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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