AHAB AND ISHMAEL AT WAR: THE PRESENCE OF MOBY-DICK IN THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

Abstract

IN 1963, FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF THE NAKED AND the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer discussed Barbary Shore and E. M. Forster in his Paris Review interview with Steven Marcus. "Forster," said the forty-year-old Mailer, "after all, had a developed view of the world; I did not. I think I must have felt at the time as if I would never be able to write in the third person until I developed a coherent view of life. " I This of course suggests that the twenty-five-year-old author who wrote The Naked and the Dead in the third person had such a view. Mailer's remarks in another interview, twelve years earlier, imply that the literary influence that most contributed to his confidence in presenting his own "coherent view of life" in his first novel was Moby-Dick: