ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick The Fiedler Thesis

A hen-pecked husband wanders away to the Catskills, where he encounters some little people bowling and falls asleep for twenty years. When he returns to his village, his wife has died and America has secured its freedom from England.

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick The Fiedler Thesis

Natty Bumppo (aka Hawkeye, aka Leatherstocking) rejects all female prospects and teams up with Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last of their tribe, during the French and Indian War.

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick The Fiedler Thesis

Ahab, the captain of a whaling ship, leaves his young bride at home in pursuit of a white whale responsible for his “dismasting” (and castration) in a novel narrated by Ishmael, a wanderer who becomes the bosom buddy of a tattooed Polynesian harpooner.

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick The Fiedler Thesis

A teenage boy runs away from home —“light[ing] out for the Territory”—to avoid being “sivilize[d]” by his strict Aunt and joins an escaped slave fleeing down the Mississippi River.

ENGL 6330/7330: Major American Writers—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick The Fiedler Thesis

Randle Patrick McMurphy, a quasi-criminal seeking some R & R, intentionally gets himself committed to a mental hospital, where he rallies the patients against the tyrannical Nurse Ratched and is finally lobotomized, inspiring the deaf and dumb Chief Broom to escape—to flee the “cuckoo’s nest”—and return to the wilderness.