Ishmael's sea journey and the monomyth archetypal theory in Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

In Melville's Moby-Dick, Ishmael's sea journey, metaphorically a voyage of understanding, brings him away from worldly boundaries and closer to a spiritual realm. This water voyage is symbolically a departure from preconceived beliefs that Ishmael consciously or not wants to question. The experience he acquired is not in seafaring as much as it is in the ways of men. The recurrent pattern of mythical implications that runs throughout the novel ultimately draws the path of the journey itself.;This thesis, then, focuses on how Joseph Campbell's monomyth pattern operates in relation to Moby-Dick and plots Ishmael's archetypal quest which leads him to a postmodern understanding of knowledge.