英美文学下诗歌整理

Moby Dick

1. Detailed Character Analysis of Ahab and Ishmael and symbolic meaning of their names

Ahab is monomania. Unlike Flask, he thinks and interprets. Unlike Stubb, he believes that he can alter his world. Unlike Starbuck, he places himself rather than some external set of principles at the center of the cosmic order that he discerns. Ahab stands for spite怨恨and revenge. Ishmael: The narrator of the story. Ishmael means being discarded. Ishmael is translated literally as “God has hearkened”, suggesting that “a child so named was regarded as the fulfillment of a divine promise.

2. Detailed Character Analysis of Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask

Starbuck: Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition

Stubb: Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over 负责his whaleboat捕鲸船as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests

Flask:He is a short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered

3. Symbolic Meanings of Moby Dick and its Whiteness

Moby Dick: symbol of nature for human beings because it is mysterious powerful, unknown. It is the Symbol of evil for the captain Ahab. It is the Symbol of good and purity because of its whiteness.

Whiteness: On one hand, whiteness enhances beauty, standards for gladness, majesty, purity and innocence. On the other hand, whiteness terrifies people, symbolizing nothingness and meaninglessness.

4. Symbolic Meanings of Pequod, Queequeg’s Coffin and the V oyage.

The pequod: doom. 1. named after a native American tribe in Massachusetts 2. did not long survive 3. painted gloomy Hack and covered in whale teeth and bones 4. the mementos of violent death 5. likes a primitive coffin

Queequeg’s coffin: life and death

Land: a symbol of safety sea: adventure and danger

"I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

Raven

1. What was the narrator doing when he first heard the tapping?

He nodded, nearly napping.

2. What did he see when he opened the door?

When he opened the door, there was nothing, only darkness.

3. What did he see when he flung挥动the shutter百叶窗?

With many a flirt and flutter, a stately raven of the saintly days of yore stepped in my house.

4. Where was the raven? And what did it look like?

It perched upon a bust of Pallas just above the narrator’s chamber door. It wore the grave and stern decorum of the countenance.

5. Why did the narrator associate the raven with an agent of the supernatural?