Progress Into Silence

Book excerpt: Melville's story is that of the young neophyte's quest for a distinctive hero in his own image and of that hero's pursuit of ultimate knowledge and authority. The controlling theme, basic to American literature, is that of the necessary fall, the innocent's emergence into manhood by means of a literal ordeal that offers, in all its pain and difficulty, important perceptions into the nature of the world. The first, and decisive, discovery is mortality. Only by confronting the fact that he will die, recognizing, as Melville often put it, the universal sentence of annihilation, does a boy become a man. Testing that perception, probing ever deeper into the mystery of things, asking questions of the meaning of annihilation as well as of its agent, man becomes a potential hero. The fullest understanding causes, inevitably, the greatest pain. Few penetrate the deepest mystery of things, and those who do are Melville's heroes.