Moby DIck

It is easy to see why Melville, himself a prey to the deepest forebodings about the optimism of his day, recognized at once his kinship of spirit with Hawthorne. "There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion (he wrote), was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne." A year after Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, Melville dedicated his own most powerful embodiment of this tragic phase, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne, his …showed first 75 words of 10300 total…

…showed last 75 words of 10300 total…it": and the sea, he reminds us shortly, covers "two thirds of the fair world." Moby Dick presents this awfulness relentlessly, even wickedly, as Melville hinted to Hawthorne. It is a cruel reminder of the original terror. If the world it presents is the starkest kind of answer to the Emersonian dream, it is not a world for despair or rejection--- as long as there is even one who escapes to tell its full story.