ABSTRACT
Science fiction novels usually reflect contemporary concerns and anxieties in the form of things to come, and often contain didactic universal messages for the present and future of humanity. But when Oedipus and Ahab are employed in the same contemporary novel, Flashforward , and appear to neither complement nor contradict one another, it is the reluctance or failure to settle for one or the other that becomes interesting. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick Ahab is captain of the Pequod, the whaling vessel which the narrator, Ishmael, joins at Nantucket, Massachusetts. Ahab’s obsession with Moby Dick is established gradually as he repeatedly asks other captains about the white whale’s whereabouts. Ahab is one of them, for pursuing a “becoming” in unchartered territories, in proximity with an animal and away from the claustrophobic family. Deleuzian theory argues against the Oedipus myth and critiques Freudian psychoanalysis for its alignment with dominant bourgeois-capitalist values and for the propagation of fixed explanatory schemata.
