For my final project, I will be discussing about the psychological tension, obsession, trauma, and inner conflict, specifically, in these three characters: Ahab, Pip, and Ishmael who go through massive evolutions of trauma and psychological problems in the story. I have always being interested on how the mind works in mysterious ways and just discovering on how mental health was back centuries ago and not fully understanding it makes me astonished.
Thesis: Herman Melville uses Ahab’s obsessive monomania, Pip’s traumatic experience psychological break, and Ishmael’s existential crisis to explore how unaddressed mental health struggles not only shape that person’s inner conflict. Melville illustrates three different psychological responses to suffering, eventually suggesting that mental health struggles form the moral and narrative course of Moby Dick.
I think this is an interesting topic, but it might be too big for this essay. I also think you’re using a term, “mental health struggles”, that signifies something in contemporary culture that did not operate in Melville’s time. In other words, it seems like you’re assuming that there is something called “mental health” and a struggle with it, which we might assume today, but did not easily map onto the 19th century. So I think you need to explain specifically what you’re planning to look at and argue. You have three examples of different types of psychology, or even psychosis, but what do you think the novel is saying about and through them? Do you think that three situations are the same and deserve to be lumped together? In other words, I’d like to see you tease this out a little bit more– the WHAT and HOW– so that you’re asking yourself what you’re actually interested in here and can then better articulate the SO WHAT.