The first part of Joseph Boone's essay Male Independence and the American Quest Novel as a Counter Traditional Genre differentiates the American quest novel from the British quest novel by highlighting the absence of the female presence in the British versions of such texts and the internalization of the symbolic feminine characteristics, as understood in by 19th century society, in the American version . This identification, as Boone claims, establishes an alternative romantic possibility, in which marriage to a woman could be replaced by a bond between two men, who usually, as the heroes in traditional westerns, are severed from a society which relies on the marital union as a glue that binds society together and enables the structuring of norms and rules, which also create the traditional structure of a novel, that the American version of the quest novel is claimed to unravel. This bond is described as the only democratic romantic bond, that is based, as stated in the second part of the essay on Moby Dick, on an equality and mutual recognition of independent identities. "it affirms one's individuality without having it"
However, unlike other depictions of an internalization of the "feminine," Ishmael is different, according to Boone. He does not only not internalize traits from the other, the feminine, he mends his splintered soul in the company of Queequeg, and incorporates the feminine that was always at his center, part of him, into his sense of identity or wholeness. Unlike Ahab, who chose to shun away from the "feminine" in him, for rational, practical and clearly obsessional purposes. An equal society, it is concluded, can only exist among members who are equal in their sense of self, and thus in a way, only an alternative, socially other society that is ultimately doomed to extinction (men cannot procreate) can exist, at least in the 19th century. yet as an alternative to the shore norms, as Boone puts it, the form of the normative novel is also challenged. I identified with this type of meta fictional reading of the novel, which highlights a center through which the themes and meanings of the characters are created, in the structural sense of the center, and then deconstructs both the  narrative center, in this case sexuality and marriage, and the fictional center, from a linguistic point of view and creates a new spaciousness, or structure. Yet it does, as related to in the conclusion, leave women out of this Utopian discourse of independence, democracy and abstinence, or kills them off.