"...I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if though gettest it, Captain Ahab?" This quote from Moby Dick is an example of the use of allegory to symbolize the stupidity of vengeance. Several of the selections from the anti-transcendentalist period use allegory to symbolize ideas from the movement, such the vengeance in Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the greed in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," and the evil in "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe.
The first selection that uses allegory is Moby Dick by…
