The reason why the former awakens our interest, whereas the latter does not, is straightforward: the transoceanic quest for a whale is extraordinary a sailor’s journal on a garment is ordinary. (James 117)ġ Every time the name of US novelist, poet, and short-story writer Herman Melville is invoked, his novel on a captain’s frenetic hunt for a white whale is what immediately comes to mind, whereas his preceding novel on the bond between a sailor and his white garment remains largely unknown. But he becomes aware of this primarily in terms of new types of human character, with new desires, new needs, new passions. It seems that at very great crises in human history, and they must be very great, an author appears who becomes aware that one great age is passing and another beginning. Melville’s White-Jacket, a Text for Our Times
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |