Relationship Between Moby Dick and Ahabs Wife :: Moby Dick Essays

Examining the Relationship Between literary Works Moby bastard and Ahabs WifeLiterature changes. One story creates a niche for another story to come into existence, or be written. What is a literary niche and how exactly does an evolutionary text fill it? Who gets to nail down? This question is easiest to answer by first gear establishing what a text cannot do it does not fill in all the missing gaps. Moby Dick created a niche for another book to come into being Ahabs Wife. In examining the race between the two books, one might say that Ahabs Wife functions in filling in all the missing pieces that Moby Dick left. For example, take the open up lines of the two books In Moby Dick, Call me Ishmael. (18) In Ahabs Wife, Ahab was neither my first husband, nor my last. (1) The first sets up a premise the second could be seen as byering, in response, another story to pick up where the other leaves off. However, upon closer psychoanalysis it becomes clear that trying to fill in all th e places where Moby Dick leaves off would be impossible such a feat could not be imagined in one text. This is because Moby Dick opens up so many niches to be filled, not only responses to its specific text or story such as Ahabs Wife but also places in the succession of literary tradition. For example, it was evolutionary in assigning heroic qualities to characters traditionally seen as renegades. The look-alike becomes clearer if one regards Moby Dick not as the premise but coming from an evolutionary line itself, responding to the treatment of characters in texts such as the password and Shakespearean plays. When one thinks of how Ahabs Wife works in relation to this line, it is elusive to say whether it actually is an evolutionary text. It does not seem to evolve from Moby Dick at all it is simply the same story. The reader may not realize this until near the very end of the book, when Una addresses Ishmael Do you sagacity we write the same book? (663) To come to any conclu sions about what kinds of niches a text might fill it helps to look at other lines by means of which texts have evolved. John Gardner, a modern academic novelist, wrote a book, Grendel, which complicates the nonsensical villain from Beowulf. In discussing evolutionary literature, Beowulf is interesting because it is the first known preserve work in English.