... the unknown is an essential part of the human experience, and when Melville calls the “nobler, sadder souls” down into the depths of the Hotel de Cluny to see how the “captive king” sits “upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages,” the text before them is as enigmatic as the white whale himself (MD, 157); yet, it is the passage “far beneath the fantastic towers of man‟s upper earth” that is important, and it is the act of reading the brow, and engaging in this world of interpretation that defines this quest (MD, 157). As both a sign and a reader of signs, Fedallah is at the heart of this journey towards the unknown.

''In: Chapter 2 Imagining Fedallah: Melville’s Parsee and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century America

In: MELVILLE‟S ORIENTAL PARSEE: REIMAGINING FEDALLAH AS READER AND SIGN IN MOBY-DICK

by Lena Patterson''