Ralph Waldo Emerson's optimistic ideal of the “self-sufficient man” in nature resonated in the literature of many of his contemporaries. Although many agreed with Emerson's principles, two important writers, Herman Melville and John Keats, chose not to emulate him in their major works. Rather, they criticized him. In the following essay I will show, first, how Melville's Moby Dick is a critique of the ideals of man illustrated by Emerson in his essays “Self-Reliance” and “Nature.” Through Captain Ahab's failure and Ishmael's survival, Melville shows how Emersonian ideals can be perverted and destructive in the search for truth. Secondly, the Romantic poet Keats also shows the potential of the dark side of self-sufficiency in his poem “La belle Dame sans Mercy”, in which the knight, in attempting to capture the elusive truth, ultimately fails. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay For the sake of chronological order, I will begin my analysis with Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Mercy." The beauty of this poem can be seen as the mysterious, non-human other, and paralleled with Moby Dick, in the sense that the attempt to encapsulate and capture this elusive truth destroys the truth seeker. As seekers of truth, Ahab and the knight both project their own distorted versions of the truth onto the objects they pursue. The knight in “La Belle” creates a love scenario, in which he and this mystical lady are blissfully united. As critic Theresa Kelley writes, “Neither the reader nor the knight are privy to her inner thoughts,” as she is “a figure known solely by her attributes” (Kelley 342). For the knight, the beauty's passive ways are easily interpreted into a semblance of love: "He found me roots of sweet taste, / And wild honey, and manna dew, / And surely in strange language he said: / I love you indeed" (Keats 25-28). it is ambiguous; its overall intentions are completely modeled on the knight's fantasies. His “strange language” is obviously reinterpreted by the knight as words of love, in order to perpetuate his favorite scenario. Kelley comments: “This 'strange language.' ...indicates how figurative meaning tends to 'err,' misreading itself halfway as it drifts away from its referent" (Kelley 342). Like the ambiguity of beauty in language and actions, the ambiguity of Moby Dick's meaning allows for Ahab and the other crewman to reflect and fixate on a specific meaning related to each man's personal concern. It is also important to recognize that the torment the knight experiences while "alone and palely loitering" (Keats 46) is, for the most part, self-inflicted. There is no agent that inflicts this alienation, only its narrow and carved reality. The eternal Promethean torment that Ahab experiences is of his own making: “God help you, old man, your thoughts.” they have created in you a creature; and he whose intense thought makes him so a Prometheus; a vulture feeds on that heart forever; that vulture is the very creature that creates” (Melville 1008). Moby Dick. If the whale is truly invincible, then Ahab has created a scenario in which it cannot exist. Ahab thus projects a gigantic meaning onto the whale, even though perhaps the whale is nothing more than a “stupid brute,” according to Starbuck. This meaning is due to the whale's symbolism of all evil in the world: "All that most maddens and torments...all truth with malice in it...all evil, to mad Ahab, was visibly personified and madepractically attackable in Moby". Fuck. He has accumulated on the white hump of the whale the sum of all the anger and general hatred felt by his entire race from Adam down..." (Melville 989). Narcissism in this allows for Ahab to fuse all of his varied anger at the universe into a single object. Thus, his monomania breeds a narrow-mindedness that Ahab believes is crucial to his ability to complete this quest: "The White Whale swam before him. as the monomaniacal embodiment of all those evil agencies which some deep men feel devouring within them, till they are left to live with half a heart and half a lung" (Melville 989) Ahab's inability to leave aside the inscrutable culminates in an interaction with Starbuck, in which Starbuck is angered by Ahab's determination to have "vengeance on a stupid brute!" Starbuck does not believe that the whale has its own agency or guiding principle, but only an animal instinct which led him to take Ahab's leg. To this Ahab replies: “He commissions me; fills me; I see in him an outrageous strength, permeated by an inscrutable malice. That inscrutable thing is above all what I hate; and be the agent of the white whale, or the instigator of the white whale, I will unleash that hatred upon him” (Melville 967). This indicates that the physical existence and overall intention of the whale are irrelevant to Ahab. Ahab is concerned about the elusive truth, the “inscrutable malice,” that the whale symbolizes for him. However, the only way he can capture this truth would be to physically kill the whale, thus possessing the “inscrutable” that had previously eluded him. As critic Michael Hoffman comments: "Three generations of critics have been concerned with what the whale symbolizes. They should have been concerned with the meaning-maker, Captain Ahab, because he, not Melville, creates the meaning." ' of the white whale. He shapes the myth of Moby Dick to give substance, form and value to his own unhappy life, and is aided in his efforts by other sailors who in turn project their own meanings onto the animal" (Hoffman). 91). Jean Paul Sartre he also chides readers of Moby Dick who relentlessly search for the ultimate symbolism of the whale: “We should cease to see a symbolic universe in the tales he [Melville] tells and the things he describes. The symbols are attached retrospectively to the ideas with which we begin…” ( Sartre 95). Ahab embodies the dangers of fusing one's will into a “supreme purpose” and relying on a meaning that will always be infected by narrow individuality. However, it still seems possible that the reader will fall into the same trap that trapped Ahab : the trap of attributing a flat-rate meaning to an object in light of an inevitably infected, narcissistic personal agenda,” Ishmael reflects on the magnetism of the sea. He draws a parallel with Narcissus and indicates that this myth is the "key to everything". This parallel seems to foreshadow Ahab's presence in the story. In the extensive literary criticism on Moby Dick, Ahab has often been called "narcissistic", an adjective used primarily to describe his selfishness. But examining the story of Narcissus, one sees a greater parallel between the doomed Ahab and the haunted young boy. Both are consumed by something they see in the water, and both dive to their deaths in an attempt to merge and thus grasp the meaning of (and merge with) that reflection. in his famous essay, “Nature,” Emerson affirms the reflective qualities of nature for man by arguing that “nature always wears the colors of the spirit” (Emerson 25, nature also seems to create reflections of the spirit, these). reflections manifested in the white whale Ahab recognizes this distorted mirror in “TheDubloon,” where after looking at the golden dubloon, and seeing only himself in the coin, he deduces that the entire earth is nothing but a reflection of man: “…this. The round globe is nothing but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's mirror, for each man in turn does nothing but mirror his own mysterious self” (Melville 1254). This confirms what was already suspected in Ahab; his solipsistic view of the universe reduces reality to a “mirror-like opacity,” in which Ahab sees only himself, reflected by an introspectively sculpted reality (Zoellner 115). Ahab takes this vision of the universe, universal reflection taken to the extreme during the actual chase, when he feels Moby Dick in his grasp. On the second day of the chase, Starbuck once again begs Ahab to abandon this doomed pursuit with the reasoning: "...you will never catch him, old boy..." To justify his actions before Starbuck, Ahab refers to himself as "Fate" lieutenant", who merely "act[s] under orders" (Melville 1394). This manipulation of fate in Ahab's purposes shows the intensity and blindness of his monomania. Not only the world mirrors Ahab, but fate itself is tailored to Ahab's whims. Although Ahab imagines himself to be without willpower, he has actually used it to desire nothing more than to capture Moby Dick: “...abandoning all his thoughts and fancies. to its one supreme purpose; that purpose, with its pure and inveterate will, has imposed itself against gods and devils in a sort of autonomous and independent being (Melville 1007).” But this will is limited by destiny, not guided by it. Ahab cannot understand a destiny other than that which will help him in his quest. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson states that “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your mind. Absolve yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world” (Emerson 149). he illusion that his quest for truth is so great, his program so great, that he will persist with the "suffrage of the world," though the whole ship is against him at all difficult for a man to deceive himself when he possesses conviction For Melville, belief is a dangerous feeling, especially in the case of Ahab, where his beliefs align with the truth: “Who surpasses me? Truth has no boundaries” (Melville 967). of man realizing all his possibilities in “Nature”. Emerson believes that spatial and temporal constraints are ineffective when faced with a personal truth or will: “We become immortal, because we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with the perception of truth or with a virtuous will they have no affinity" (Emerson 47). Ahab strives to maintain self-inflicted madness and intentional alienation, and "assiduously cultivates this dehumanization, protecting it from any influence that might mitigate its terrible singularity” (Zoellner 100). He must be completely immersed because he knows that Pip could cure this madness, but he does not want it: “There is something in you, poor boy, that I feel too curative for my disease likes; and by this hunt, my illness becomes the most desired health” (Melville 1363) has a similar sentiment, writing, after being entranced by nature, that “the name of the closest friend then sounds foreign and accidental: being”. brothers, to be acquaintances, masters, or servants, is therefore foolishness and a nuisance" (Emerson 24). Just like Emerson, the neighbor to Ahab becomes irrelevant after his immersion, merely an accessory to the great quest. Indeed, "nature it ismediate thoroughly. It is made to serve. He receives the dominion of man with the same docility as the donkey on which the Savior rode[…]” (Emerson 38). Considering the destruction that Moby Dick's attempted "domination" entailed, Melville would probably find this passage ridiculous. Emerson's “doctrine of nature as instrument and mind as technician,” succinctly formulated by critic Frederick Garber, is a potentially dangerous assumption when it coexists with evil. Of course, one of Melville's biggest misgivings about Emerson was his ability to ignore the evil in the world, assuming it was tempered by a greater good (Garber 196). For Melville, this anthropocentric vision expressed by Emerson produces tragic results if man cannot accept his insignificance in an inscrutable and immense universe, in which his conceptions of truth are irrelevant and no more all-encompassing than those of any other man. Believing that «all the facts of natural history, taken alone, have no value, but are sterile, like a single sex. But to marry it to human history, and it is full of life” is to ignore the incredible autonomy of Moby Dick, the cruelty of the sea, and the futility of man's attempts to reign over nature (Emerson 32). It seems that an epic drama of man is unfolding on the sea, but once man is destroyed in a brief anticlimactic whirlwind, the sea continues to roll “as it rolled five thousand years ago”. This anti-climax and uprooting futility demonstrates the farcical quality of Ahab's impossible quest. The only survivor of this shipwreck is Ishmael, who all along seemed acutely aware of his insignificance in the grand plan, as well as the inscrutability of the truth. . In retrospect, he states: "I think I can see a little of the reasons and motivations which, having cleverly presented themselves under various disguises, led me to start playing the part I played, as well as persuaded myself into the illusion that it was a choice" . arising from my impartial free will and discriminating judgment” (Melville 799). Ishmael does not see the whale as his defining truth; he is not fixated on his own identity in relation to it. Rather, he is an objective viewer and attempts to understand the whale from all perspectives, including scientific, philosophical, and literary. Unlike his captain, he does not see the whale through the lens of revenge or ultimate truth. Ishmael does not believe he can master the truth by mere physical conquest of the white whale. At the beginning of chapter 49, for example, Ishmael bitterly expresses his anger that the universe has become a "vast practical joke... and more than he suspects that the joke is at no one's expense but the expense sue” (Melville 1035). It's a nice change from the first chapter, where we are introduced to an Ishmael who feels a little cheated by his relatively insignificant place in the “great agenda of Providence,” but comically accepts it as his own, due to the fact that “it was drafted long ago” (Melville 799). Although Ishmael's attitude towards destiny has changed, what has not changed is Ishmael's belief in destiny itself Unlike Ahab, he does not embark on an immense, autonomous quest to conquer an inevitable destiny and an inscrutable truth, he never loses sight of the joy that can be found. in camaraderie. In “A Squeeze of the Hand,” for example, Ishmael is assigned the pleasant task of squeezing lumps out of gallons of oily spermaceti extracted from the sperm whale. As time goes by, Ishmael becomes fascinated by this task, connecting with nature through spermaceti and, therefore,.