| When Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he was exploring the zone between belief and unbelief. While believing in God's existence, he also believed in his malevolence. God betrayed man's bodily life by introducing the possibility of annihilation. If selfhood is defined by what is inside and outside of it, then any destruction of this boundary leads to the annihilation of the sense of self. Cannibalism destroys the inside by consuming the outside. Abandonment concentrates the sense of self such that the self believes that self is nothing. Finally, the idea of linguistic annihiliation shows that pain resists adequate representation in language, thereby destroying the pained being. As language serves as Melville's metaphorical pacing between unbelief and belief, it fails in its purpose to draw boundaries of the self. The final image is of a circle that both contracts down around the self and expands to embrace a world of differences. |
