Anaphora: Journal of Language, Literary, and Cultural Studies Volume 1 Number 1 July 2018 23 Page 23 – 27 SARTRE’S EXISTENTIALISM IN HERMAN MELVILLE’S MOBY DICK Ambar Andayani Departmen of English University of 17 Agustus 1945 Surabaya, Indonesia Email: Abstract. From the perspective of Sartre’s existentialism, it can be concluded that Ahab is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Through what he does against that white whale, he gets his meaningful existence. Ahab exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself. Ahab gets happiness with his plan and act to kill his mighty woe. Furthermore Ahab’s decision at the same time creates an image of man that in general will do the same thing. Keywords: existentialism, existence, essence, character INTRODUCTION Existentialism becomes a great philosophy in the nineteenth century. It is a very famous philosophy that many philosophers contribute their minds for it. Existentialism is the basic philosophy about human, which is suitable with this era where now we are compressed by high technology and we neglect human values. Then finally we come to a question why we exist? Some philosophers who were enthusiastic on existentialism were Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Jaspers and Sartre. They come from different countries, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard comes from Denmark; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche comes from Rocken, Prussia; Nicholas Alexandrovitch Berdyaev is from Kiev, Russia; Karl Jaspers is from Oldenburg, Westphalia; and Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris. Nevertheless they have one same idea about existentialism that for human being, existence comes first before essence, that makes we are different from another creature. The idea of existentialism is very universal, that the writer is interested to discuss and she finds the reflection of it in the work of Herman Melville i.e. Moby Dick. Melville chooses the sea as the setting of the story that symbolizes freedom of nature and whaling, a dangerous job that was so popular in America in the 1840’s as the topic of the story that symbolizes adventure. Melville does not choose social life that happens everyday, distinctively however he takes setting of the sea that needs a deep contemplation to interprete. Then the story of whaling involving the captain and the crews has strong characters that all of them are men. The story describes high spirit and struggle to catch a whale that is Moby Dick. Clifton Fadiman (1962) in his afterword gives a comment about this literary work: “Here is a rich, vivid account of life at sea, of ships and sailors, of man against nature, of whaling in the mid- nineteenth century. At every level the Pequod’s expedition is an extraordinary one”. In this case Pequod is the name of the ship. The captain and the crews have a tremendous and tense journey. In this journey, there are many conflicts; between the crews and the captain, among the crews, between