Articolo
Abstract

Just before the fatal encounter with Moby Dick, Captain Achab remembers his life and prepares for his imminent future, while Starbuck, the chief mate, tries to persuade him to back down and return to the old Nantucket. At that moment, Melville begins a reflection on spatiotemporal distance, which is similar to the one portrayed in The Piazza, where a writer’s alter-ego imagines a fairyland on top of a mountain from his piazza. However, after a long trip, he finds out that it is only a place of sadness and loneliness, where a girl lives specularly convinced that the narrator’s house is a happy place. Thus, reflecting on distance and imagination, Melville can teach us that in order to overcome a crisis we need to take on the past and face head-on the disaster headed to a new Nantucket, without imagining a fairy-land as distant as it is unreachable.

In questo numero