ABSTRACT
An association is with the Leviathan, the biblical sea monster that gave its name to an important political-philosophical work by Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, and a lengthy treatise on state, monarchy, and knowledge: all matters examined in The Beast Below’s extended allegory. Henry Miller himself is inside the whale. The Beast Below actively invites readings identifying political allegory. The episode offers satire on aspects of the contemporary world. The Beast Below invites a further, socio-economic, reading of its satirical parable. The emotional, inner world drama of The Beast Below can be summed up as the move from the first, opening poem to the second, end version. A way of framing the crisis dramatized in The Beast Below is to highlight the narrative of reparation in the back-story. The Beast Below is similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four in some ways—where Britain is rendered as “Airstrip One”.
