Whale hunt
Today: Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks and The Way to the Spring.
Issue No. 470
Bedtime Story
Ben Ehrenreich
Welcome to Moby-Dick Week
Questions of good and evil have suddenly become very urgent in the United States, and so there seems to be a lot of Melville in the air. Is evil a discrete, separate force in the universe, or is it a curable illness in humanity, the side-effect of centuries of trauma? As our contribution to this long dialogue, weβve collected a series of essays and comments on the classic American novel Moby-Dick to close out the distressing year of 2025.
An evocative criticism we read in preparation for the series is βMoby-Dick After September 11thβ [JSTOR] by the Irish critic and academic Denis Donoghue. It was published in 2003, shortly after the start of the Iraq War. Donoghue addressed the question of evil right up front.
Keep us breathing fire!
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