Melville's Aesthetic Innovation for the Initiation Narrative in Moby-Dick
Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick not only describes the story of Captain Ahab’s whale hunt, but also contains the growth writing of Ishmael’s self-exploration. With the rise of the study on American Bildungsroman in the 1940s, people have tended to interpret Ishmael’s growth from a thematic perspective, but the innovating techniques used in initiation narrative has often been ignored. Based upon the social, historical and cultural context of Moby-Dick, this paper makes analysis on Ishmael from three dimensions-the structure of Ishmael’s coming-of-age narrative, the sequence of his coming-of-age narrative, as well as the shaping of the narrative subject. This paper explores Melville’s unique narrative strategy in defamiliarizing the structure of American Adam Myth, examines the cyclical time model driven by Ishmael’s visual aesthetics, analyzes Ishmael’s ambiguous shaping that blends fictionality and facticity, expecting to reveal the growth logic hidden behind these innovating narrative techniques.
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