Moby Dick

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dramatists or Racine or even the poet of Job could count on an audience culturally predisposed through myth, theater, or racial view to accept at once a drama of direness. Hawthorne had to make his own audience, to lead it by easy stages, as it were, into the dark idea. Hence the familiar, reassuring tone of the Custom House introduction, where the only dire events involve a certain goose of tragic toughness and the routine political loss of a job not worth holding. Hence the whimsical apology, in advance, for the "stern and sombre aspect" of Hester's story--- "too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; to little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them"--- an apology which we may well regard as almost wholly tactical.
And hence (among other reasons) the long preliminary phase of , introducing Ishmael, the reassuringly normal one who would go to sea now and again to ...

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and familiar. He is average, goodhearted humanity, though somewhat more given to meditation than most and (as he says of himself) "quick to perceive a horror." His optimism lies not in his denial that the horror is there but in his hope of being "social with it"--- "since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in." Only gradually does this hope come to be fully tested. All the little horrors of the early stages of his adventures are accommodated to his hearty, comic vision. He accepts the wintry and forbidding conditions of his stay in New Bedford with good cheer. The inauspicious omens in Father Mapple's chapel fail to daunt him. He shares ...

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