SOURCE: “‘Circle-Sailing’: The Eternal Return of Tabooed Grief in Melville's Moby-Dick,” in The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 38-67.
In the following excerpt, Boker presents a psychoanalytic reading of Melville's motivation in Moby-Dick, suggesting that Melville felt abandoned by his mother and that his art was nourished by “repression, disavowal, and displacement of grief.”
