I. Introduction引言
1.1 Melville’s Life Story 梅尔维尔的生活故事
赫尔曼·梅尔维尔1819年出生在纽约市，八个孩子中第三个出生，在玛丽亚甘西沃特和梅尔维尔之后，国外商品的进口商。家族企业在19世纪20年代末衰败，从梅尔维尔迁往奥尔巴尼并试图恢复他们的命运。一连串的霉运和劳累过度，使他的父亲早逝，而年轻的梅尔维尔被迫开始在十三岁时在银行工作。
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819, the third of eight children born to Maria Gansevoort and Allan Melville, a prosperous importer of foreign goods. When the family business failed at the end of the 1820s, the Melville relocated to Albany in an attempt to revive their fortunes. A string of further bad luck and overwork, however, drove his father to an early grave, and the young Melville was forced to start working in a bank at the age of thirteen.
经过数年的正规教育，梅尔维尔18岁离开学校成为小学老师。这个职业突然停止，后来在报社担任报社记者。
After a few more years of formal education, Melville left school at eighteen to become an elementary school teacher. This career was abruptly cut short and followed by a brief tenure as a newspaper reporter. Running out of alternatives on land, Melville made his first sea voyage at nineteen, as a merchant sailor on a ship bound for Liverpool, England. He returned to America the next summer to seek his fortune in the West. After settling briefly in Illinois, he went back east in the face of continuing financial difficulties.
最后，在二十一岁的时候非常绝望，梅尔维尔承诺无限期在一个叫叫Acushnet公司的船上的捕鲸远航。
Finally, driven to desperation at twenty-one, Melville committed to a whaling voyage of indefinite destination and scale on board a ship called the Acushnet. This journey took him around the continent of South America, across the Pacific Ocean, and to the South Seas, where he abandoned ship with a fellow sailor in the summer of 1842, eighteen months after setting out from New York. The two men found themselves in the Marquesas Islands, where they accidentally wandered into the company of a tribe of cannibals. Lamed with a bad leg, Melville became separated from his companion and spent a month alone in the company of the natives.
Life among these natives and numerous other exotic experiences abroad provided Melville with endless literary conceits. Armed with the voluminous knowledge obtained from constant reading while at sea, Melville set out to write a series of novels detailing his adventures and his philosophy of life. He writes Moby Dick, which appeared in 1851. He died in 1891.
1.2 Moby Dick
Moby Dick; or The Whale, firstly appeared in 1851. A story of monomania aboard a whaling ship, Moby Dick is a documentary of life at sea and a vast philosophical allegory of life in general. No sacred subject is spared in this bleak and scathing critique of the known world, as Melville satirizes by turns religious traditions, moral values, and the literary and political figures of the day.
Melville was strongly influenced in the writing of Moby Dick by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, whom he finally met in 1850 and to whom he dedicated Moby Dick. Melville hd long admired Hawthorne’s psychological depth and gothic grimness, and he associated Hawthorne with a new, distinctively American literature. Though the works of Shakespeare and Milton and stories in the Bible (especially the Old Testament) influenced Moby Dick, Melville didn’t look exclusively to celebrated cultural models. He drew on sources from popular culture as well; for example, were extremely popular in the nineteenth century. In particular, Melville relied on Thomas Beale’s encyclopedic Natural History of the Sperm Whale and narrative Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, by J. Ross Browne.
By the 1850s, whaling was a dying industry. Whales had been hunted into near-extinction, and more economical sub-statutes for whale oil had been found. Despite its ambitious range of cultural references and affiliation with popular genres, Moby Dick was also a failure. Its reception led Melville to try to defy his critics by writing in an increasingly experimental style and eventually forsaking novels altogether in favor of party.
Moby Dick remained largely ignored until the 1920s, when it was rediscovered
