The Will and the Whale: Glory and the Horizon of Defiance in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Man’s challenge to nature’s grandeur. It is furthermore designed to delineate the insatiable desire of the American man to attain glory at all costs. As the title suggests, I shall try to highlight the horizon of defiance to nature’s rules through the American classic Moby Dick (1851). In sum, I shall be discussing the American man’s penchant for defying failure throughout Ahab, the vengeful character who is in the tradition of the evil man of fiction who strives to annihilate “evil” with evil. By so doing, I will shed light on how Ahab’s will cannot surpass Nature’s will and how this engages Ahab in a Schopenhaueran pessimistic disappointment.