Herman Melville

Herman Melville’s enduring masterpiece, Moby-Dick, is often regarded as a very progressive novel in its representation of ethnicity, and religion. Melville uses the mixed ethnicities/faiths of the harpooneers and likewise motley crewmen to illustrate an egalitarian social order among the ship’s crew. Even the lowly cabin boy, Pip, and the cook, Fleece emerge as far richer characters than the base caricatures of African-Americans that they may at first appear to be. This deceptive use of…

the foundation of the Union. Many supporters of Manifest Destiny were Christian, thus the reason for "God's given right", making religion of the main ideas behind Manifest Destiny. A novelist of the time, Herman Melville stated: We Americans are the chosen people- the Israel of our time (Melville), and so furthering America's right to expand westward. America, as the chosen nation, had the obligation to expand its knowledge, culture, and religion to the western civilizations. In an 1839…

faults of slavery. Although his novella may seem too serendipitous upon first glance, it nonetheless exposes Douglass’s adamant view against the wretched condition of slaves through the fervent actions of abolitionist, Mr. Listwell. In contrast, within Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno,” the author…

American classic author, Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” short story tells the tale of a lawyer that worked on Wall Street and a man that suffered from depression. Bartleby was hired by the Wall Street lawyer to be his scrivener and to check and recheck official documentation. After two days of him being hired and working, BArtleby begins to become lazy and deny any task given, ultimately he’s not doing anything aside from annoying and aggravating his coworkers…

Are emotions, including those that are unintentionally revealed, contagious? Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno, explores this concept through a misconstrued series of gestures and remarks between Amasa Delano, an American sailor, and Benito Cereno, a Spanish captain, who encounters the sailor after leading a disastrous journey upon his slave ship. Melville’s carefully constructed prose illuminates the possibility of such a theory. The following passage is taken from the moment after…

Benito Cereno is a story by Melville Herman, and the work was serialized for the first time in the Putnam’s monthly in early 1855. In developing Benito Cereno, Melville relies solely on the biography of the real Captain Amasa Delano, whom Melville depicts as the principal character and also as the main protagonist (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/benitocereno). Delano relates how in 1805, his vessel that was named Perseverance bump into the Spanish Tryal. It was a ship whose captives had overthrown…

Throughout the short story of “Bartleby, The Scrivener” by Herman Melville, the narrator, or the lawyer, tells the reader how Bartleby’s continuous passive resistance behavior led to his tragic downfall. Although this story is an example of the downfall of passive resistant protests, it helps bring to mind of the effectiveness of it. This form of passive resistance has been a trend in protesting for the last hundred, or so, years. Ignoring the recent, by recent I mean the last eight years,…

There are many pieces of literature and media that embody the idea of transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism. In this quarter, we have read Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walden by Henry David Thoreau. We have also watched the films Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Fight Club, all of which refers to transcendentalism and anti-transcendentalism in some way or another. Transcendentalism is the belief that knowledge of reality is derived…

level. In terms of literary criticism, psychoanalysis provides a way to see how a character’s actions reflects on their psychological state. It allows the reader to see where their actions stem from. Applying Freud’s psychoanalytic to an analysis of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, will shed light on certain aspects of the story. In particular, looking closely at the three main characters in the novella, John Claggart, Billy Budd, and Captain Vere provides a deeper understanding of the overall…

precedent may be set that will allow for improper judgment in future conflicts. If Vere were to ignore the effects of his judgment, perhaps Billy would have lived. Unfortunately this is not the case, and Johnson, passing her own judgment, writes, “what Melville shows in Billy Budd…