Guide Mentor

Character Role Analysis

Your Conscience (Let It Be Your Guide)

Okay, none of us is actually a character in the book. Fair. Quick tip, though: the extended philosophical musings Melville tosses at us are definitely a sort of navigational tool that only work if we're engaged as readers. There's no one perfect viewpoint, no one ideal means of deciding what's right in this text.

We're sort of relying on our own intellectual—and possibly ethical—merits to decode messages from history, literature, the Bible, and philosophy that are filtered through some seriously flawed characters. Nobody else is going to do our interpreting for us; we're on our own here.