Herman Melville was born to a New York City merchant who fell on hard financial times and then went mad. His mother was left alone to raise eight children. Melville dropped out of school by age twelve and went to work as a clerk and farm hand, but he continued to read voraciously. When he was nineteen, Melville signed as a seaman on the Nantucket whaler Acushnet, and he spent the next five years traveling the world. In his mid-twenties Melville returned to New York to write about his adventures. Typee (1846) told the story of his experiences among the cannibals of the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. It was an overnight best seller and made Melville famous. 

A few years later Melville tired of writing travel and adventure stories. He moved his family to Pittsfield Massachusetts, befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne, and began work on a grand new novel based on his whaling experiences but drawing more deeply on his study of Shakespeare and the Bible. Moby Dick tells the story of Ishmael, a whaler who goes to sea with Captain Ahab, a one-legged megalomaniac obsessed with hunting and destroying the great white whale which took his leg years before. Reading Moby Dick will teach you everything about whales, whaling and sailing in the mid-19th century, but it is much more: Moby Dick is a great allegory about the quest for ultimate control of destiny. In Ahab's mind, the white whale represents those mysterious forces of nature which defy human understanding or control, and Ahab will destroy any force outside of his own intelligence and will.

"The Town-Ho's Story" also is an allegory. An allegory can best be understand as an extended metaphor in which every detail in the story fits into an elaborate symbolic web.

1. What happens in the story? (Explain its action in a sentence or two.)

2. Describe the elaborate frame that Melville constructs for his story. From whom did Ishmael learn the story? To whom is it being told? WHY? (frame1) (frame2)

3. How do the details of the story fit into Melville's allegorical purpose?

4. Melville punctuates the story with two elaborate asides. In the first he describes the Great Lakes region from which Steelkilt hails, and in the second he describes the Canallers who join Steelkilt's mutiny. Why are these asides in the story?

5. How does Melville describe Moby Dick? How does this symbol function in allegory?

6. Review Hegel's definition of the force moving history forward. How is his allegory influenced by this conception of history?