Melvilleの短篇に於けるserenityの追求
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概要
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Melville, who is said to have experienced a kind of catharsis after he had finished writing The Whale, again in Pierre (1852) plunged into his monomaniac search for moral truth with the result that he reached utter scepticism in Christian morality, tending towards nihilism. In his shorter tales, which were all written from 1853-1856,instead of fathoming metaphysically the ambiguous profundities of the human soul for moral truth, he started to make an attempt to recover from the feeling of solitude and frustration caused by nihilism and to get, though on a lower level of being, serenity by acquiring some definite belief. In this paper I have tried to trace the aspects of this search for serenity and to make clear a) that, by giving up the all-or-nothing absolutism he had hitherto been embracing, Melville thought it necessary to look at things through a balanced mind which could accept as a fact the existence of both the bright and the dark sides of life, both the good and the evil of the world ; b) that the serenity he sought was to be attained by mutual affection among men, based on firm belief in the innocence or goodness of men and on the recognition of the bond among men as fellow beings ; c) furthermore that this search for serenity is closely related to his remarkably humanistic morality disclosed in his postumous work, Billy Budd, in which, rejecting God's grace, Billy attained salvation through the mutual understanding between himself and Captain Vere and the firm trust in each other's goodness and innocence.
- 東海大学の論文