| This thesis explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick using a reader-response approach. The reader's emotional engagement with Ahab as both hero and villain illuminates the complexity of making moral choices and leads to a deeper understanding of self and other. This project assumes the complementarity of reader-response criticism and other critical methods that focus on intent, text, and context. The subjective voice is used to express personal responses, and secondary sources are used to compare and contrast the reader's responses to others in the interpretive community. |
