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Edward Edinger has written a fine book about a great book. Herman Melville's Moby- Dick, possibly America's finest novel, is an epic tale whose sheer grandeur and scale fit perfectly within the broad reach of an archetypal perspective. Edinger's Melville's Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia reads the classic nineteenth century text in a classically Jungian way.
In fact, Moby-Dick seems to have been made for a classical Jungian interpretation. Melville's great sea story provides all the ingredients - heroic adventure, character study, even a mystical element - to which Edinger applies many of the major tenets of a Jungian approach: an archetypal viewpoint, religious amplifications, the night sea journey, the quest, transformation, number symbolism, typology, artists as conveyors of the collective unconscious, parents as mediators of it, schizophrenia as being overwhelmed by it, etc. Themes this big require a big book - you need the material to fit the scale of the theories - and Moby-Dick provides them. Edinger's wide-ranging amplifications are informative and well summarized. They also benefit from Edinger's relative avoidance of another Jungian standby, alchemical symbolism, which is primarily of interest only to those heavily steeped in Jungian literature.
Moby-Dick is a superb story even without an archetypal analysis, in the same way that the Odyssey is. Despite the use of nekyia in the title, Edinger's book does not delve much into that corresponding section of the Odyssey. What makes Moby-Dick so moving, among other things, is its tragic nature. Melville spares us the Walt Disney ending; hence, the story feels real and has true emotional weight. Its plot and character development, leading inexorably to its electrifying climax and the destruction of all its characters, possess perfect dramatic potential.