摘　要

《白鲸》是 19 世纪美国著名小说家赫尔曼•麦尔维尔的巨作，被认为是世界上最有象征意义的小说之一。作者在小说中充分使用了象征主义手法，使小说充满了永久的艺术魅力和超越时空的文学价值。从典型的人物到自然景观，小说中出现的任何事物都有其象征意义。因此，对小说的象征意义进行分析是非常必要的。本文主要探讨象征主义在《白鲸》中的运用。本文分析小说的两个主题：复仇以及人与自然的象征意义，以及小说的这两条线索中涉及到的主要人物及意象的象征义。通过分析，可以发现《白鲸》这部小说就是一个缩小版的真实社会。本文旨在通过对《白鲸》中象征意义的解读，唤起人们在现实社会中更深的思考，从而实现人与自然以及人与社会的和谐。

关键词：《白鲸》；象征主义；主题；线索；和谐

Abstract

Moby Dick is the masterpiece of Herman Melville, a famous American novelist of 19th century, and is considered to be one of the most symbolic novels in the world literature. The author has a good use of the symbolic methods in the novel and makes the novel full of the permanent artistic charm and the literary value above time and space. The book is highly symbolic, almost everything, from typical characters to natural landscapes, has its own symbolic meaning. Therefore, it is quite necessary to analyze the symbolic meaning of the novel. This paper centers on the use of symbolism in Moby Dick. This paper sets out two main themes: the revenge and the symbolism of human and nature, and the paper has an analysis of the symbolism of the main characters and imagery involved in novel according to the two main clues. After analysis, it can be found that this novel is a scaled-down version of real society. Besides, the propose of the paper is to evoke people’s deeper thinking in the real world by analyzing the symbolism in Moby Dick, so as to achieve a harmony between man and nature, man and society.

Key words: Moby Dick；symbolic meaning；themes；clues；harmony

1 Introduction
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels in America history. It tells the story of a deranged whaling captain’s obsessive to find and destroy the great white whale that has ripped off his leg. The Captain Ahab has only one purpose on his voyage: to seek out and kill Moby Dick, a ferocious, gigantic and mysterious white whale. And at the end of the story, Ahab killed the white, but in the meantime, the whale carried the ship along with it to its doom and only one person  survived, the story narrator, Ishmael. The novel is once sea whaling, and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of good and evil, of man and his fate.