美国文学作业.doc

Ahab: a tragedy hero
Moby-Dick, also known as The Whale, is a novel first published in 1851 by American author Herman Melville. The story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whale ship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ahab is the main character in this novel. He seeks one specific whale: Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale who destroyed his boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to take revenge on him.
In this novel, the author showed us a vivid image of a tyrannical captain who is driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Moby-Dick.
Ahab has the qualities of a tragic hero— a great heart and a fatal flaw— and his deeply philosophical ruminations are expressed in his language, his name and his life.
His deeply philosophical ruminations are expressed in language that is not only deliberately lofty, but also so heavily iambic as often to read like Shakespeare's work
Such as: …"Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me forever and a day!" … "Aye, aye! And I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! To chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."(Moby-Dick, Chapter 36)
From his name Ahab (a name of an Israel king in Bible), we can indicate the captain’s tragedy fate.
In Ishmael's first encounter with Ahab's name, he responds "When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?" (Moby-Dick, Chapter 16).
Ahab ultimately dooms the crew of the Pequod (save for Ishmael) to death by his obsession with Moby Dick. During the final chase, Ahab hurls his last harpoon while yelling his now-famous revenge line: “... to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
His personal life is also a tragedy. Late in the novel, Ahab begins to reminisce about how sad and lonely his life has been: He’s spent forty years working his way up on whaling ships, and only after he’s reached the far side of fifty does he marry. When he does get married, to a lady much younger than he is, he only gets to sleep with her once before he has to get right back out there into the ocean, leaving her a "whaling widow" with a child he’s never seen
Ahab's death is richly symbolic. He is killed by his own harpoon, and symbolically killed by his own obsession with revenge. The whale eventually destroys the whaleboats and crew, and sinks the Pequod.
Moby Dick, in this novel, is sometimes considered to be a symbol of a number of things, among them God, nature, fate, the ocean, and the very universe itself. Captain Ahab stands for human who wants to conquer nature, fate or God. However, if human’s purpose is only to defeat or destroy the God, nature, fate..., he will finally devour himself.