Symbolism of the White Whale

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Home; Category: News; Published: 02 July 2026; Hits: 862

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Perhaps no literary symbol has generated more interpretation than Moby Dick himself.

The whale functions simultaneously as literal animal and symbolic mystery.

Readers have interpreted him as:

Nature itself
Divine power
Fate
Death
Evil
Innocence
Chaos
The unconscious mind
The unknowable universe
Human fear projected outward

Remarkably, all these interpretations find some support within the novel.

Melville deliberately preserves ambiguity.

The whale never explains itself.

Instead, human beings reveal themselves through the meanings they impose upon it.

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Travel

India

October 2009

In summary

India was amazing. It was just as I had been told, read, seen on TV and so on but quite different to what I expected; a physical experience (noise, reactions of and interactions with people, smells and other sensations) rather than an intellectual appreciation.

Fiction, Recollections & News

Alan Turing and The Imitation Game

The movie The Imitation Game is an imaginative drama about the struggles of a gay man in an unsympathetic world.

It's very touching and left everyone in the cinema we saw it in reaching for the tissues; and me feeling very guilty about my schoolboy homophobia.

Benedict Cumberbatch, who we had previously seen as the modernised Sherlock Holmes, plays Alan Turing in much the same way that he played Sherlock Holmes. And as in that series The Imitation Game differs in many ways from the original story while borrowing many of the same names and places.

Far from detracting from the drama and pathos these 'tweaks' to the actual history are the very grist of the new story. The problem for me in this case is that the original story is not a fiction by Conan Doyle. This 'updated' version misrepresents a man of considerable historical standing while simultaneously failing to accurately represent his considerable achievements.

Opinions and Philosophy

Luther - Father of the Modern World?

To celebrate or perhaps just to mark 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his '95 theses' to a church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the Protestant Revolution, the Australian Broadcasting Commission has been running a number of programs discussing the legacy of this complex man featuring leading thinkers and historians in the field.

Much of the ABC debate has centred on Luther's impact on the modern world. Was he responsible for today? Without him, might the world still be stuck in the 'Middle Ages' with each generation doing more or less what the previous one did, largely within the same medieval social structures? In that case could those inhabitants of an alternative 21st century, obviously not us, as we would never have been born, still live in a world of less than a billion people, most of them working the land as their great grandparents had done, protected and governed by an hereditary aristocracy, their mundane lives punctuated only by variations in the weather; holy days; and occasional wars between those princes?

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