Moby Dick Rhetorical Analysis

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Forgive Blaming someone has always been easy; forgiving someone became much harder. In Herman Melville’s saga novel, Moby Dick, he tactfully wrote a story of some harpooners hunting down a whale to persuade readers that people should learn to forgive others and themselves, with abundant symbolism and imagery. In Moby Dick, Melville applied symbolism to illustrate that the “harpooners’s” hate, which opposes the forgiveness, eventually cause the disaster. “Each of the harpooners has seen Moby Dick, and they each know a little about him—how his spout looks, how he moves his tail, and how many different harpoons he has in him already”, author mentions, in order to depict the heinous figure of Moby Dick. “The harpoon”, that Moby Dick has in him …show more content…

“This bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it”, the author vividly portrays a picture of “after-war” scene, by using simile of Satan and symbolism of the flag of Ahab, to states his opinion of that hate results in chaotic ending of all people dying. Moreover, Melville also writes in the end, “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”, which is a peaceful image after the “war” between the haters and the “criminal”. The Ahab achieved his goal of killing the whale, but he also lost his and all his sailors’ lives. After all, no thing left. Thus, this peacefulness correspondingly affirm that the revenge would only cause chaos, but nothing

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