| Περίληψη: | (...) In the fervor of his desire to engage just such issues as were finally to elevate the narrative of Moby-Dick into cosmic drama, however, Melville was unfair to the preceding novels when he dismissed them us jobs since, in fact, they are novels of power that spoke tellingly to readers in their day and speak even more powerfully today to readers with a modern perception of psychological reality. And especially unfair because in them he matured the craftsmanship that opened the way to the literary form he failed to find in Mardi when he constructed that novel as allegory. As Newton Arvin wrote in his biography of Melville, the leading images of Moby-Dick are 'symbols in the strict sense, not allegorical devices or emblems; symbols in the sense that their primal origins are in the unconscious, however consciously they have been organized and controlled; that on this account they transcend the personal and local and become archetypal in their range and depth; that they are inexplicit, polysemantic, and never quite exhaustible in their meanings'. Far from hack work, Redburn and White-Jacket had led their author to the mastery of such symbolic technique. Moreover, these two novels compelled Moby-Dick by exhausting all of Melville's remaining nautical experiences save the central one - whaling. If he were to continue in his novel-writing to draw upon his years at sea, then Ishmael had to go a-whaling. (...) (from the publisher)
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