【正文】 es in The Culture Interpretation of the Symbolic Significance in MobyDick, He has suffered setbacks again and again, but he will never be defeated. The fire of life can be put out, but his selfesteem will never be conquered. [9] (p99) Therefore Ahab pledged that he would go to every place of the world to find Moby Dick out and kill it, in order to eliminate the shame it had brought to him. Zhu Guangqian believes that, in tragedies, the sense of dignity is as important as the idea of fate. If there is no break, no struggle for disasters, there will be no tragedy. So Moby Dick is just like a mag which attracts Ahab’s unwavering resistance. 4 The Performances of Struggle Ahab’ life is unfortunate. During the forty years of whaling life in the sea, he has experienced nearly all kinds of hardshi。s eyes, all the crew must take the task of killing Moby Dick as their sacred responsibility, from which we can see that Ahab has imposed his own will on others in order to plete his mission. He regards the lives of the sailors as valueless as grass. From the very beginning, Ahab has pledged, “I?ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition39。s tragedy and romanticism into an integral whole. It has been recognized as one of the masterpieces in the world literature treasurehouse. Main Content of MobyDick MobyDick (1851) is the masterpiece of Melville, the wellknown American romantic novelist in the19th century. With the great vehemence of the tragic epic and the tragic artistic conception of Shakespeare, MobyDick molds a heroic tragedy character—Captain Ahab, who is a grand, ungodly, godlike man. The leading character of the novel Ahab lost a leg when he encountered Moby Dick, which seemed to be a great shame to him. So he pledged that he would spare no effort to take revenge on it. At that time, people believed that man was the master of his own fate. Therefore, Ahab started his crazy revenge in order to save his selfesteem. From then on, this difficult mission had bee the only pursuit of his life. In order to achieve this goal as soon as possible, Ahab began to search the whereabouts of Moby Dick the moment he went out to sea. He tried all kinds of means to find it out. Meanwhile, he made all sailors obey his will by various ways. Ahab realized clearly that he would have to pay a heavy price for this. However, he still made up his mind that he would rather die than live in dishonor. With great courage and dedication, Ahab tried his best to fulfill his mission without hesitation. No matter who begged him to stop, no matter what obstacles he had met on the way, Ahab still insisted on his goal. In the end, all the people were buried into the sea except Ishmael, who narrated the whole story as an experienced person. And Ahab finally found out his own destination of spirit by the way of perishing together with Moby Dick. 3 The Personality of Ahab Many critics have done researches on MobyDick. But they all believe that Ahab is a demon, a crazy man, because they just analyze Ahab from his crazy activity in pursuing Moby Dick, which is only a small part of Ahab. They have ignored Ahab’s inner personality. Ahab is a man who would never bow to fate and takes selfesteem as his life. He believes that a person can be killed, but he can’t lose his selfesteem. This chapter will focus on appreciating Ahab’s personality prehensively. A Lonely and Crazy Hero –Ahab Heroes are always lonely, and Ahab is no exception. He is inpatible with the surrounding world, and always silent and speechless. The brutal reality and the hierarchical system had imprisoned him so firmly in the whaling ship that he could not get out of this narrow space. However, when Moby Dick took away one of his legs, Ahab became even more eccentric because of the kind of physical destruction and mental torture made by it. To take revenge, he made up his mind to leave his only daughter and his wife who had been married to him for ten years. Thus, he started the miserable navigation just as: trying to find a needle in a haystack. During this long voyage, what had brought to him were only the suffering of torment and the endless mental torture. In the bottom of his lonely heart, a kind of helplessness also revealed, which made him feel even worse. In such case, Ahab had to pour out these innermost pains, which had piled up in his heart for so many years. Forty forty forty years ago! ago! Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of privation, and peril, and stormtime! Forty years on the pitiless sea! For forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led。 關鍵詞： 自尊 , 抗爭 , 白鯨 , 亞哈 , 英雄悲劇性 Abstract MobyDick (1851) was written in the19th century. It is the masterpiece of the wellknown American romantic novelist Melville. The author narrates the tragic story of Captain Ahab who tries to kill Moby Dick by all kinds of means. This activity has caused the ship to be destroyed and humans perished. Through this novel, we can find that, on the one hand, the leading character Ahab defends his selfesteem and struggles with destiny on the other hand. In the course of pursuing Moby Dick, Ahab never retreats, no matter what sort of unlucky omens or warnings he meets. This kind of resistance to the destiny and the god is performed vividly in the novel. The article integrates Zhu Guangqian’s The Tragedy Psychology together to elaborate the