Herman Melville wrote out of a strong creative impulse closely tied
to an even more imperative will to survive, to resist the ravages
of despair and the urge toward self-annihilation that grew out of
an all-too-clear vision of the world he saw around him. In his
novels Melville wrote of this struggle to survive in a harsh,
unyielding world, creating characters such as Ahab and Pierre, who
thrash about blindly because of self-ignorance, and characters such
as Ishmael and the confidence man, who seek instead the calm and
the power that lie at the center of man's being.
The final work in his critical trilogy on Melville's fiction,
William Dillingham's study of the later novels delves into the
writer's deepest and most vital concerns to trace the search for
self-knowledge that guided the creation of "Moby-Dick," "Pierre,"
"Israel Potter," "The Confidence-Man," and "Billy Budd," "Sailor."
Dillingham shows how Melville used the novels as a workshop for his
own salvation by investing his characters with the ideas and
philosophies that he found compelling or attractive.
In Ahab, Melville located the Gnostic vision of life--a vision
of alienation and isolation--that he felt powerfully drawn to yet
knew would lead to his own destruction, while in Ishmael he created
a character who pursues an alchemic quest for the purity to be
found at the core of all men, of all nature. The blinding egotism
that fueled Ahab's pursuit of his own destruction would in
different ways afflict Pierre, Israel Potter, Claggart, and Vere,
while Ishmael's determination not to separate himself from life and
his search for self-understanding would be reflected in the
transformations of the confidence man and in the luminescent purity
of Billy Budd.
Linking Melville's enigmatic narratives with the artist's own
epic of self-exploration, "Melville's Later Novels" presents a
rounded, deeply original portrait of a life sustained by art.
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