Monomyth in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Abstract

      This article examines Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey through the lens of Herman Melville’s monumental novel Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale. Campbell’s seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) develops the concept of the monomyth, according to which the mythological narratives of diverse cultures are reduced to a unified, archetypal structure. The fundamental stages of the monomyth—Departure, Initiation, and Return—are grounded in Carl Gustav Jung’s notion of psychic totality (Jung, 1957:141), wherein personal development entails separation, confrontation, and subsequent reintegration. When an individual’s prior beliefs, emotional patterns, and value systems no longer correspond to new lived experiences, the “call to adventure” becomes an unavoidable necessity rather than a matter of choice. The significance of such a transformative passage is particularly evident within American Transcendentalism, whose central principles emphasize self-knowledge and the imperative of rational thought. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, the figure of Captain Ahab sharply embodies the conflict between reason and passion: survival and just action depend upon the rational evaluation of facts, the analysis of events, the consideration of alternative perspectives, and the anticipation of potential risks. Ishmael, by contrast, traverses a profoundly complex path of self-understanding and comprehension of the world, beginning with the early chapters of the novel and culminating in its final episode. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale thus synthesizes the psychological dynamics of individuation, the philosophical tenets of American Transcendentalism, and the archetypal structure of the monomyth, enabling Melville to construct a deeply philosophical narrative framework.