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Moby-Dick and Twenty-First Century Theodicy

Abstract:This essay examines Moby-Dick as a mid-nineteenth-century fictional response to the Christian tradition of theodicy, or the attempt to justify the goodness and justice of God in the face of evil and unmerited human suffering. Given Moby-Dick's grounding in the traditions of theodicy going back to the book of Job, it is a potentially revealing exercise to compare Melville's novel to more recent examples of this form of discursive analysis, which have greatly proliferated over the last half-century. By examining a representative sample of early twenty-first century Christian theodicies by writers of varying denominational backgrounds, I seek to demonstrate that Moby-Dick dramatizes many of the same issues as discussed by these works, but by framing the issues in narrative and dramatic form, Melville's novel becomes significantly more compelling as an extended exhibition of the problem of evil than any discursive rationalization of its existence within the confines of Christian dogmatism.