Sin And Salvation

Herman Melville (1819-1891) is now openly recognized as one of the greatest writers in the 19th American literary history in particular for his masterpiece Moby Dick, a great book with heart-shaking whaling experience, philosophical meditation of realism and fantasy, vested with the poetic coloring of romance. However, in his life time, Melville never achieved the recognition until the 1920s when"Melville Revival"was launched after more than thirty years of silence and Melville established himself as a great master of arts. This paper, starting from a new perspective, attempts to offer some new studies on Melville and Moby-Dick—Puritanism in Moby-Dick.With this aim, this paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter gives a general introduction of Melville and his masterpiece Moby-Dick. The literature review and innovation of the paper are stated in the second chapter.The third chapter is to discuss sin and salvation in Moby-Dick. It falls into three parts. In the first part, the author gives the concept of Puritanism. In the second part, the author deals with the sins in Moby-Dick. The sin of pride and the sin of wrath are talked about respectively. In Moby-Dick, Melville's view on such sins as Pride, and Wrath can demonstrate his Puritan view. Melville severely criticized the sin of pride, for which Ahab was the first to blame. Ahab is angry because his pride is wounded, and his"wounded pride", though comes from a terrible sense of hurt, with which we can sympathize, is essentially blasphemous. Ahab's sin of wrath can be demonstrated through his mad revenge on Moby Dick. Ahab's madness is initially presented in his strong decision to revenge himself on Moby Dick for the loss of one of his legs. The white whale is all evil to Ahab. In the third part, the author analyzes the path to salvation in Moby-Dick. Melville arranges the only one Ishmael to survive from the disaster at the end of his book. The reasons why Ishmael is the only one person to survive are mainly discussed in this part.In the fourth chapter, the author analyzes sin and salvation embodied in Biblical archetypes. This chapter is divided into three parts: Biblical archetypal criticism,biblical archetype of Ahab, and biblical archetype of Ishmael. Puritanism in its essence is Christian. The Bible is the central religious text of Christianity. So in order to examine Puritanism in Moby-Dick, the analysis of biblical archetypes should not be neglected. Biblical archetypes of Ahab and Ishmael help to strength the Puritan color of the novel. The fifth chapter offers the conclusion of the paper.The efforts made for this paper are meaningful with the construction of a systematic study on Moby-Dick from the perspective of sin and salvation. Hopefully this will offer a new direction for the study of Melville and his masterpiece Moby-Dick.