ABSTRACT
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is at once mythopoeic and prosaic, an epic tale of good and evil that unites primal metaphor with narrative realism. This convergence of “the factual and the fanciful” (Arvin, 1957, p. v)—the literal and the symbolic-is an American prototype of allegorical realism that transcends the peculiarities of time and place and crosses the border between literary and political genres. As such, it typifies the practical operation of myth in contemporary political persuasion-including the presidential rhetoric of George W. Bush, which continued the tradition of articulating national identity and insecurity in terms of that which is alien, evil, and subversive (Campell, 1998, p. 3). As analogs of sacred myths, political myths are accepted by the public as essentially valid, “especially those established over long periods of time” that purport to convey in myriad forms “a true account of past, present, or predicted political events” (Flood, 2002, pp. 41, 44). These plastic images are the cultural DNA of national identity (O’Shaughnessy, 2004, pp. 87-89, 94-97).
