Files
Abstract
A consideration of Moby-Dick is also a reconsideration of the sonic and written components of language. The book is fascinated with the ways in which language structures consciousness. It presents a highly verbal crew, a wayward and ambiguous narrator, and a driven, hyper-literate sea captain to engage with the very nature of reading, thinking, and communicating. This essay moves through a consideration of the effect of letters on the mind, encountering Walter Ong and Roland Barthes along the way and explores the differences between fixed and fluid consciousness and between speech and writing in Moby-Dick. My end is to understand the type of reader that the book shapes for itself and its status as a multi-media creation. It promulgates a relationship with language that is liberating, open and expansive, and ultimately, reproductive.