Part 12, Sections 64-67 Summary and Analysis

Part 12: The Wilderness Within begins with a quote from Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" about the sea and land having a strange analogy to the self. Section 64: An American at Sea claims that while other voices of the American Literary Renaissance sang about the beauties of nature, "the heroic American literary myth would be a classic tale of revenge, negation, ambiguity, madness, and encounter with evil" (p. 642). Seizing upon the popularity of whaling in New England in the early nineteenth century, Melville used it as the subject of his great American epic, reflecting on the paradoxes of good and evil. Though it lacks the development and conflict of characters necessary for a novel, "Moby Dick" presents personalities described as caricatures, and Ahab's hunt for the whale represents the mystery of the self; for twentieth century readers, the novel...