Melville's Use of a Source for White-Jacket

Abstract

NY STUDY of must rely heavily upon the work of Professor C. R. Anderson, who, in his Melville in the South Seas, has made a close and very valuable study of the book. In one chapter, however, White-Jacket as Romance, Professor Anderson comes to the conclusion that many episodes of varied importance in did not actually occur in the course of the cruise, and consequently attributes them to Melville's imagination; one of Melville's shipmates concurred in that estimate when he lettered Fiction beside some of those chapters in his copy of the book.1 Since students have identified many literary sources for incidents in Typee and Omoo which have been thought autobiographical or invented, it is not surprising that some of these fictional episodes in can be identified as borrowed. The identification of one such source and an analysis of Melville's use of this material make up this paper.