A Comparative Study Of Moby Dick And The Old Man And The Sea Under The Perspective Of Ecocriticism

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, are two representative works in American literary history. Before the emerging of ecocriticism, the studies of them mainly focused on the symbolic meaning of the books or the images of the protagonists, and there were few comparative studies. While with the development of ecocriticism, the studies of these two books were enlarged, and there occurred many articles comparing the ecological thoughts reflected by the protagonists in these two books, but most of the studies have just analyzed the relation between man and nature.Based on Lu Shuyuan’s classification of ecocriticism, this paper is going to have a comparative study of Moby Dick and The old Man and the Sea from three aspects, namely the relation between man and nature, the relation between man and man, and the relation between man and himself. By comparing these two books from the perspective of ecocriticism, the different ecological thoughts reflected in these two books and the warnings shown by the different ends of them will be revealed.There are totally six chapters in this paper. Chapter one is the introduction part, in which a brief introduction of these two books and the previous studies about them at home and abroad is made, besides this part also presents the research method, the value and the outline of this paper. Chapter two introduces the development of ecocriticism, especially the theories put forward by Lu Shuyuan and the significance of ecological studies in classical literary works. Chapter three concentrates on analyzing the different attitudes Ahab and Santiago hold towards nature which are Ahab’s anthropocentrism and Santiago’s ambivalence. Chapter four analyzes the different relations between man and man reflected in these two books, namely people’s indifference towards each other in Moby Dick and people’s friendliness in The Old Man and the Sea. Chapter five studies the relation between man and himself embodied by Ahab and Santiago, namely Ahab’s alienation of himself and Santiago’s redemption of himself. The last chapter is conclusion. It summarizes the main points this thesis has discussed and brings out the implications of the study. Apart from this, this part also covers the limitations of this paper. To sum up, a comparative study of these two books makes it clear that human beings can only build an ecological society by building a harmonious relation with nature, with man and with themselves, or we will finally be punished and destroyed.