Ahab and Ishmael at War

The Presence of Moby-Dick in The Naked and the Dead

Authors

  • Bernard Horn Framingham State University Author

Keywords:

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, The Naked and the Dead, literary influence, Ahab, General Cummings

Abstract

Reprinted from American Quarterly 34.4 (Autumn 1982), Bernard Horn’s essay takes up Mailer’s own remark that Moby-Dick was the biggest influence on The Naked and the Dead. Arguing that Melville, not Hemingway, is Mailer’s deepest precursor, Horn traces how Mailer divides Ahab between General Cummings and Sergeant Croft, whose wills to power echo the captain’s, and recasts the quarrel between Ahab and Ishmael as the struggle between Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn. Mailer’s crucial departure, Horn finds, is to turn Melville’s tragic plot into a plot of education, centered on Hearn’s dawning awareness of the Ahab within himself, a pattern of master and disciple that recurs throughout Mailer’s later novels.

Author Biography

  • Bernard Horn, Framingham State University

    Bernard Horn is Professor of English Emeritus at Framingham State University. His poetry collection, Our Daily Words, winner of the Old Seventy Creek Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the 2011 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His translations of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines, and his poems have been featured on Writer’s Almanac and used to commemorate 9/11 on huffingtonpost.com. He is the author of Facing the Fires: Conversations with A. B. Yehoshua, the only book in English about Israel’s pre-eminent novelist, chaired the MLA Division on Literature and Religion, and was awarded a Fulbright and five National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.

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Published

2016-09-28

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): 10th Anniversary Issue

Section

Classic Interpretations

How to Cite

Horn, Bernard. “Ahab and Ishmael at War: The Presence of Moby-Dick in The Naked and the Dead”. The Mailer Review, vol. 10, no. 1, Sept. 2016, pp. 350–369, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/581.