Defamiliarization in Moby-Dick

Years at sea, however, took Herman Melville far out of the familiar world of New York and Albany. Melville was not the only writer of the time who found the sea a rich source of metaphor. His contemporary, Flaubert, said in 1846 that ¡°the three finest things in creation are the sea, Hamlet, and Mozart¡¯s Don Giovanni.¡± (Marcus Cuncliff, 1975: 102) Herman Melville just wrote several sea novels out of his own very experiences at sea. For Moby Dick he chose a South Sea voyage in a whaler. In so doing, and in sticking to the ship instead of roaming off among real or imagined islands, he provided himself with a firm social and occupational framework. Thus anchored to actuality, he could let his imagination run free. The novel has tremendous power. It moves grandly through alternations of excitement and ease to the almost intolerable tension of the three-day chase of the White whale, and the eventual, inevitable disaster when the whale kills Ahab, then smashes the Pequod. (Marcus, 10...