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After many boring years of teachering life, he decides to purse the beauty of nature. He comes to the sea to find the mystery of nature because ,one side, sea life can cure his sense of boring, and in another way, his interest is fully satisfied. In the story, Ishmael shows his friendly attitude to the nature. In his opinion, white whale is not the symbol of evil but the beauty of the great nature. And at the end of story, finally, Ishmael has learnt the essence of the nature. Everyone has his own image of nature, which is totally different from others. People use their own feeling to fill the blank space of the description of nature. That is to say, there is no nature in this world, and it is our imagining and subjective consciousness which create the word of nature. So everyone’s nature is completely different, and in Ishmael’s view nature is beautiful and mysterious. He thinks the nature is equal with human like a friend.
4 The Symbolism of Relationship between Man and Nature in Moby Dick
Melville make a clear definition of the relationship between man and nature, and we can find this from many places.
4.1 The Hidden Relationship between Main Characters and Nature
There is no doubt that Ahab is a typical resister of nature, which leads to his death. However, Ahab has fighted with nature for his whole life. Before the end of his life, he lost one of his legs in his last whaling voyage. This failure greatly hurts his self-esteem, which finally drove him to madness. At this time of stage, revenge is only reason for him to live. He has always been of the opinion that human should conquer the nature. And in his view, nature is just a stone under his feet. But in fact it is just the stone which took away one of his legs, and he can never endure this shame. He has sworn to hunt to the death of the great whale, and would not lose any opportunity of finding it. For example ,when the Pequod sails across the Pacific，he keeps asking each one of the ships he encounters," SHIP, ahoy! Hast seen the White whale? Human madness is a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have became transfigured into some still subtler form. So in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own mad mark. To conclude, for Ahab, the pursuit of Moby Dick has become the sole purpose of his existence. He is mad, but his madness is one that conserves all its cunning to achieve its end. The opinion on the relationship between human and nature, he has a different opinion from other people’s at the same time. He predicts that human’s greedy plunder of nature will led human to a tragedy inevitably, which is actually the fate of Ahab. Also, Ahab and the Pequod represent human ambitions to nature. It is such ambition that drives a lot of people in that age to plunder nature. During the time of flying capitalism, this crazy spirit has caused huge damage to the nature. The symbol of Pequod is that industrial civilization’s violence and exploitation to the nature. And the name of Pequod comes from an extinct race, which also represents the failure of human’s conquering for nature.
For the white whale, different people in the story have different opinions. From crazy Ahab, he thinks it is the incarnation of all the pain and devil. From Ishmael, it is the symbol of windy universe. From the pagan sailor, it is the deep shock. However, I think it is the perfect symbol nature. The destructive power of Moby Dick actually represents the power of nature. When facing human’s endless plunder, the anger of nature usually will destroy everything. This is the perfect integrating point of these two objects. In reality, the whale is huge wealth for those hunters. The whale oil and blubber is treasure that human hunting for ,which is just the symbol of the abundant products of nature. That is to say, nature and white whale are both victim of human’s pillage. On the other hand, white whale is such a beautiful creature in the world. In the note of Ishmael, he writes that the graceful gesture of swimming ofthis creature can never be talked with a normal animal. Also, nature is famous for its mysterious beauty, which make people crazy. Thus it can be seen, human’s wild ambition to conquering nature is doomed to fail, and also will get punishment from nature.