Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure considering that Herman Melville is a great symbolist. Please make an analysis on this viewpoint.
Moby-Dick turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in the quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology.
Melville is a master of allegory and symbolism. Instead of putting the battle between
Arab and the big whale into the simple statements, he used symbols, that is, objects or persons who represent something else.
Different people on board and the ship are the representations of different ideas and different social and ethnic groups: facts become symbols and incidents acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truth. The white whale, Moby-Dick, symbolizes nature for
Melville, for it is complex, unfortunate malignant, and beautiful as well.
For the character Arab, however, the whale represents only evil. Moby Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind. For the author, as well as for the reader and Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable and ambivalent, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain search, not discovery of the truth.
