Final Project Proposal: I really want to elaborate on my second essay about illumination and how Melville uses whale oil and whalers to reflect on the actual cost of what humans are doing. The contradictions between whalers bringing the light to society while living and acting in the darkness. The whalemen are shown to be both creators and destroyers, and Melville shows quite clearly (ironically enough) that the line between these two is often quite blurry and hard to distinguish.

My thesis is going to argue that a whaleman’s very “life of light” is both his glory and his doom, always tied closely together. I will show this not only through the actual content of the novel but also through the physical grammar and syntax that Melville chooses to use through its structure and rhythm. “What begins as just a factual observation about whale oil, which happens to be the literal “food of light,” expands into a moral and metaphysical reflection on the cost of illumination itself. Melville’s language transforms physical light into a spiritual metaphor, complicating the whaleman’s apparent purity by revealing the violence and destruction that make such light possible in the first place.” 

Through this creative project I will be demonstrating this argument in an expanded essay of at least 6-8 pages with multiple sources such as Steve Mentz’ articles on the study of blue humanities. I chose this format because it gives me enough space to trace Melville’s symbolic patterns and connect them to broader environmental and ethical questions.