Week 5 Planning: The Battle Between Moby Dick and Ahab

For my next story, I will incorporate Melville’s Moby Dick into The Ramayana or The Mahabharata. This week in my Fate and the Individual course, we are reading Moby Dick and will be done with the book by Thursday. By that time I expect to have enough background information from my lectures and from reading the story itself to form some type of love-obsession battle story behind Ahab and the Whale… I plan to discuss with Dr. McClay about what was happening in America at the time of Melville’s writing and describe all these events in a story where we have Ahab’s obsession with taking down the whale – just as Rama’s obsession with finding Sita, and somehow juxtaposing that to America.

Another thing that I realized would be great to incorporate into my final project is to have Auden guide Patrick through Hell, just as Virgil Guided Dante through Hell. The difference between my blog and the Inferno will be as Patrick is going through hell, he encounters all of the literary characters – both villains and heroes – and he will listen to how they all got sent to hell. The storybook/portfolio will follow Patrick in 4 days going from the top of the earth into the very core of hell where in those 4 days he will encounter characters that represent the 3 main sins – incontinence, violence, and fraud. I have not yet decided who ALL will be in hell.. but I definitely want to include Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Ahab, and… maybe William Blake?..... I’m not sure yet. Then, at the very center of hell, I will include Albert where he is eating all of the bad guys in Hell. SO Albert will be like a superhero-good guy in hell where all the literary western bad guys will be dying. Anyways, All battle scenes and drama scenes will be taken from The Mahabharata and The Ramayana.


The 9 circles of Hell from Dante's Inferno image from abc.net.au

Bibliography:

­­Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Ramayana by Dharma