Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth

I have attempted to describe the internal morphology of Melville's fictional world and to trace the implications of the form of his vision of things as it gradually develops throughout the span of his career as a writer. My special perspective is provided by "Hawthorne and His Moses" in which Melville defines fiction as the "greatest Art of Telling the Truth" ans implies that an essential part of the career of any writer is his search for a form which will allow him safely to explore and reveal a destructive and maddening Truth. This focus is necessarily restrictive, but Melville's fictional world, like that of any great writer, is composed of an unlimited number of horizons, and an unlimited number of critical perspectives are possible. I have chosen one which seems to me to reveal an interesting and important portion of Melville's fictional landscape.