SOURCE: "The Great Plain: Rölvaag's New World Sea," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Autumn, 1982, pp. 35-49.

In the following essay, de Grazia studies the symbolic influence of the sea as a creative force, and the negative effects of the sea's absence, in the novels of Ole Rölvaag.

It is but one touch of Melville's genius that he opens Moby-Dick by introducing us to a neurotic Ishmael who, with "nothing particular to interest [him] on shore,"¹decides on the sea as the way of driving off the spleen. That Ishmael's condition is typical—felt if not realized by ordinary folk—Melville's opening paragraphs also make clear. We are introduced there to streets that lead inevitably waterward, to crowds of water-gazers with backs turned to jobs and green fields, to "thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries" (M-D, p. 24). In a later chapter Melville...