Ahab and Melville navigate - Eric Bulson

In Eric Bulson's Novels, Maps, Modernity:  The Spatial Imagination, the discussion of the topology and representations in Moby Dick of the space in which Ahab's mad quest after the white whale exists, an imagined, metaphysical and physical place, through which the characters and the reader navigate. he discuss at first the fact that Melville himself created representations of laces he had never visited, relying on the liuterature and maps available at the time to create his own verbal representation of Nantucket. this kind of verbal mapping out of a place can be thought of also as a plotting out of a story, which both Melville and Ishmael do, yet while IShmael is the narrator of tre events, Melville is the narrator of the imaginary, mapping out a world which as shown is borrowed from reality. There is a tension, according to Bulson, between orientation and disorientation, along the entire ocean quest, but that is not only limited to the search for a whale in the four oceans - a needle in the haystack type of search which in its nature starts from a disoriented and unscientific point of view. Ahab is described as the character wiht the charts and the props that help him navigate through the abstract ocean, he can see, while Ishmael has none of the tools nor the skills to do so. But he zigzags from place to place, relying on instincts and other senses, such as smell to track down the whale, which does not abide by the laws according to which maps and quests are planned out, and thus his ability to map and plan become redundant. But Ishmael is eventually the one who draws out the map of Ahab and his hunt after Moby Dick. It is interesting to think of this in light of the compass, the magnetism that Ahab speaks of in himself, that can replace the magnet of thecompass that breaks. he imself is the indicator