Trips and Readings from the Split House: Melville, Stone, Moby Dick, and Platoon

Abstract

In this essay, Oliver Stone's film Platoon reflects Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick as narratives in which characters, Chris and Ishmael, leave their country on a journey fraught with danger. Chris goes to war in the forests of Vietnam and Ishmael joins the whaling Pequod, hunting whales in the world's oceans. Both narratives have as their background the tensions of their divided home, the United States of America. In a war movie the combat scenes are central and Platoon describes the daily conflict of a small unit. Search and destroy operations carried out by multi-ethnic troops reflect social tensions in the United States. Platoon pursues a determined and defiant enemy of American scientific and military power. The novel Moby Dick is a metaphorical portrait of a divided America and Captain Ahab a maddened in his personal revenge against the White Whale. American strategy in Vietnam, like hunting Moby Dick, destroys Platoon and Pequod. Employing Michel Onfray, we consider both narratives as journeys initiated in a library and whose heroes repeat the gesture of the Greek Achilles, abandoning the secure home life for the danger in the world that leads them to immortality. Our heroes, supported by a symbolic family of brothers, whether in Pequod or Platoon, take the risk to finally mature. Their symbolic parents Ahab and Barnes are castrating, repressive, and subjecting everyone to their authority. The heroes' complete liberation occurs as they confront and eliminate their symbolic parents, ending their circular journey back to the home from which they departed.