Bill:
I love it when someone comes up with an interpretation at polar opposites to my own...it convinces me once again of the relevance of the Kuhnian duck-rabbit gestalt shift to aesthetic interpretation. See, for me, Ahab is an ubermensch in the making, and someone that the novel frequently depicts as a Promethean figure, carrying the accumulated injustices since Adam on his shoulders. Egotist, surely, but remember, in his mind, he was taking on God in the name of truth and justice. When he asks Starbuck "Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged before the bar", Ahab faces the implications of his actions (in "The Symphony").
Bartleby seems to prefer to stare at that blank wall out the window from where he sits, reminding me of the "colorless-all-color nothingness of atheism" of which Ishmael spoke in "The Whiteness of the Whale". Bartleby is more than just a rebel against wage slavery. He is the logical outcome of believing that the world has no meaning; hence there is no reason to prefer doing one thing over another. Rather than the frenzied hedonistic activity of which Camus spoke, that seems to be the logical outcome of facing the absurdity of existence...paralysis.
Dan
"For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy
Daniel Shaw
website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw
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