About the Book
Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of *Moby-Dick, by Robert Zoellner, offers a bold and original critical exploration of Herman Melville’s great novel. Written, as Zoellner explains, “in sheer self-defense” against the terrifying power of *Moby-Dick*, the book seeks to understand the sources of the novel’s unique intensity and the paradoxical combination of fear and delight it produces in readers.
Zoellner proceeds through a systematic analysis of the constitutive metaphors, philosophical underpinnings, and narrative strategies that shape Ishmael’s telling of the tale. Central to his approach is the argument that *every word* of *Moby-Dick*—even dramatic monologues and footnotes—comes from Ishmael, not Melville, a critical assumption that allows Zoellner to treat the novel as a coherent first-person creation rather than a text riddled with breakdowns of point of view. Across chapters, he traces the interplay of illumination and darkness, primal forms and cosmic mirrors, Ahab’s narcissism and Ishmael’s cyclic vision, and the manifold ways the whale itself becomes a vehicle of revelation.
Rejecting critical approaches that treat literature as mere “fun,” Zoellner insists that the exhilaration of *Moby-Dick* arises from the reader’s confrontation with primal truths—fearful but necessary to grasp. His study thus aims not to reproduce the joy of reading Melville’s masterpiece, but to illuminate its sources, revealing how Melville’s metaphors, myths, and philosophical structures create a work that is at once terrifying, exhilarating, and inexhaustibly rich.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.
Zoellner proceeds through a systematic analysis of the constitutive metaphors, philosophical underpinnings, and narrative strategies that shape Ishmael’s telling of the tale. Central to his approach is the argument that *every word* of *Moby-Dick*—even dramatic monologues and footnotes—comes from Ishmael, not Melville, a critical assumption that allows Zoellner to treat the novel as a coherent first-person creation rather than a text riddled with breakdowns of point of view. Across chapters, he traces the interplay of illumination and darkness, primal forms and cosmic mirrors, Ahab’s narcissism and Ishmael’s cyclic vision, and the manifold ways the whale itself becomes a vehicle of revelation.
Rejecting critical approaches that treat literature as mere “fun,” Zoellner insists that the exhilaration of *Moby-Dick* arises from the reader’s confrontation with primal truths—fearful but necessary to grasp. His study thus aims not to reproduce the joy of reading Melville’s masterpiece, but to illuminate its sources, revealing how Melville’s metaphors, myths, and philosophical structures create a work that is at once terrifying, exhilarating, and inexhaustibly rich.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.