The story Moby Dick focuses on Captain Ahab, the one-legged commander of the whaling ship Pequod. Ahab has sworn to kill the gigantic whale Moby Dick, who took away his leg. The captain of the ship is named Ahab. Peleg and Bildad, who are the owners of the ship consider Ahab to be a good man, but because of some strange illness, he is confined to his cabin. The strangest thing about Ahab is his leg. Instead of flesh and bone, he has a white ivory peg leg. One day, he calls the crew before him. He tells them that the sole mission of the Pequod is to kill Moby Dick. Moby Dick is a gigantic sperm whale with a crooked jaw and a deformed forehead. He has never been defeated, and has attacked and sunk entire ships. Ahab admits he hates Moby Dick for taking his leg away, and wants revenge. The crew agree to this challenge, and swear to hunt him down. For many months, the Pequod sails across great oceans and seas, Along the way, they kill and drain the spermaceti oil from every sperm whale they encounter. Finally, after entering the Japanese sea, the Pequod encounters a whaling ship named the Enderby. The Enderby’s captain had just recently lost his arm to Moby Dick. Ahab becomes so excited at the news that he breaks his ivory leg. The ship’s carpenter builds him a new one. Once reaching the waters around the equator, the Pequod meets another whaling ship, the Rachel. They had seen Moby Dick, and had become separated from one of the whaling boats during the battle. Ahab refuses to help them look for the missing men.

At last, Moby Dick is spotted by Ahab. In the first day of fighting, the whale is harpooned many times, but escapes after smashing Ahab’s boat. On the second day, the whale is harpooned again, but still escapes. On the third day, Ahab’s harpoon pierces the whale, but the rope catches him by the neck and Moby Dick drags him to the bottom of the sea. An angry Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod.

Moby Dick is a story about Captain Ahab’s obsession, his monomania. When he first set sail, Ahab’s original plan was to hunt only Moby Dick and ignore other whales. Once he realizes that his men will abandon him if they do not make some sort of a profit while at sea, he encourages them to hunt other whales and boosts the morale of the crew.

Ahab is definitely the hero of Moby Dick, but he is a tragic hero. Everyone in the novel who knew Ahab prior to losing his leg considered him to be a great man, and one of the finest captains. However, after the loss of his leg during the first battle with Moby

Dick, Ahab’s tragic flaw appeared. He was obsessed. He wanted revenge, and nothing else. Ahab considered Moby Dick to be the embodiment of all that is evil. This monomania is what sent the Pequod halfway around the world to the Pacific Ocean, where Ahab (and almost everyone else on the Pequod) died.

One of the most important elements in a great literary work is universality. The main idea of the novel (destructive obsession) is universal. Tragedy is not only a literary and theatrical practice, but also constitutes an object of contemplation, which has served as an intellectual touchstone for many philosophers and artists. Among the most influential theorists are Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Brecht. Tragic plots normally describe some aspect of the relationships between human suffering and right or wrong action, and they describe it in the form of a fictional story. This puts the relationship between art and morals under scrutiny .

Individuals within a group have two options: cooperate with the group or defect from the group. Cooperation happens when individuals agree to protect a common resource to avoid the tragedy. By cooperating, every individual agrees not to seek more than their share. Defection happens when an individual realizes that it is in their interest to use more than their share of public resource. And this is what happened actually with the sadist Ahab. The fact that the tragic man suffers first is obvious as he becomes too obsessed to get more than his share be it in the form of revenge only, it drifts him away from the goodness and he may indulge himself and others in this conquest like Ahab did while encouraging his crew to kill other whales for their individual pursuits.

Emma Bovary, a timeless character, it epitomizes the pain of women who believe too much in fairy tale romance and that a white knight will come to solve all their problems. The character of Emma- Madame Bovary is tragic, suffering intensely from her lack of insight into her own character and the true nature of reality. It is this primarily this aspect of her romantic perspective and how this leads to her downfall. It’s about a woman who was raised in the convent, her life, her scandalous conduct, and her untimely death. The tragedies of the novel are based on these relationships, especially the relationship of Emma to herself, to the men in her life, and to the peripheral characters in her life such as her daughter, Berthe, Monsieur Lheureux, the proprietor of the local dry-goods store, and Justin, the pharmacist's assistant. One of the tragedies of Emma Bovary's relationship with herself was that she never really understood herself. Emma did not realize that the yearning she had for an exciting lover who would romance her amidst the trappings of luxury was engendered by her reading of silly, sentimental stories.

Striving for higher social status has been the downfall of many people just as it was the destruction of Emma Bovary. In the story, "Madame Bovary," we see a number of individuals striving to move themselves up to the bourgeois, a status that is higher than the working class but not as high as nobility. The bourgeois are characterized by being educated and wealthy but unlike the aristocrats, they earned their money through hard work and kept it through frugality. Our bourgeois strivers in "Madame Bovary" kept up appearances but they would never quite make it to the full rank of bourgeois. Because the level of one's social class status is determined so much by appearances, an individual can keep up a good front and be accepted into the circle when they are out of town where no-one knows the truth. Emma followed this practice in her pursuit to really belong. "Madame Bovary" is about a sense of self, a search for personal identity and reality versus illusion.

The transformation of Emma to Madame Bovary is a sadist one, and in this league for belonging she too loses the sense of the thin line between good and bad like Ahab, and becomes too obsessed with her passion which ultimately leads to her untimely death.