ABSTRACT
LITERARY historians have had great difficulty in classifying Moby-Dick (1851) since its character has many features iunusual in the classical form of the novel. Its vastness and its poetic rhythm undoubtedly give it the grandeur of an epic. Its monologues, dialogues, mass-scenes and the inclusion of whales, ships, sea and sky as participating actors lend it an intensely dramatic quality. Thus the unavoidable conclusion was that Moby-Dick could not be classified among any of the known forms of literature—that it was a unique work of art. In approaching it from the psychological point-of-view it appears to me that Moby-Dick has the greatest similarity to a fairy-tale or, rather, a myth. However, a fairy-tale or myth generally describes the psychological and spiritual situation of a particular age or people; it is stripped of individual characteristics and frequently reveals in great detail the collective psychic condition of the people who produced it.
