Characters
The crew-members of the Pequod are carefully drawn stylizations of human types and habits; critics have often described the crew as a "self-enclosed universe". There are 30 crew members, and as there were thirty states in the union at the time, it has been suggested that, in its diversity, Melville meant the Pequod to be a metaphor for America.
Read more about this topic: Moby Dick
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)