Gulistan state university department of the english language and literature

CONCLUSION


In Moby Dick, Herman Melville creates a tale in which the focus is upon two men on that vast ocean: one is trying to repress and destroy a great white whale, the symbol of his pain, for its threat to his imagined supremacy; the other is exploring that great oceanic vastness for all its mystery, strangeness and life, symbolised in his ‘marriage’ to Queequeg.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
Using the imagery of Moby Dick, this paper has argued that monomania is spawned from a passion of ignorance. This passion of ignorance is situated at the boundary of reality, on the edge between the alternatives of love and hate. This boundary is actually the boundary between the ideal ego and the ego ideal, that is, between the fantasy that an individual has of themselves and the potential that is inherent in all that they have acquired in the journey of life. To choose the former is to necessitate the extinction of the latter, but it is a choice that carries with it meaningless pain, a pain without purpose.
My clinical material presented a patient, Mathew, who was also in agonizing pain and in the grip of obsession. The agonizing pain of deprivation and non-existence offers a choice: to begin a heroic journey, like Ishmael, towards growth and individuation, taking faltering steps towards building a relationship with this greatest of fears; or to continue on the destructive and obsessional path towards death and non-being.
At this uncanny tale’s dramatic termination, imagined and experiential realities are so tightly knotted they cannot be undone. The most tragic thing that can happen in life is not that we experience suffering and pain but that this suffering remains meaningless.