The purpose of my study is to consider primarily from a psychoanalytical perspective Melville's employment in Typee of the trope of the apocalypse. In many of his works, Melville—by consciously or unconsciously employing world-shatteringly-apocalyptic language and imagery—acts to, and re-enacts, the terror, revulsion, and shame which western culture associates with materiality, mortality, gender, and sexuality. Yet Typee, while driven in no small degree by such western-apocalyptic fears of monstrous Body, attempts a different project—to realize the carnivalesque possibility of what Julia Kristeva terms a "laughing apocalypse"—and its success in that endeavor is something which Melville's later work, even Moby-Dick, will be able to recapture only to an ever-lessening degree. In Typee , Melville demonstrates not only the ability to resist the threatening sense of judgment traditionally associated with western apocalypse, but also, more importantly, the capacity to subvert the culture-defining power of the myth by attempting to redefine it as a judgment-free, dissolutive, amorphous, and carnivalesque embrace of Body and Other.

While Typee is Melville's most fully-carnivalesque work, it is marked by indecision and a wildly-oscillating tension between western- and laughing-apocalyptic confrontations with Body and Other. By focusing particularly on violently-apocalyptic or psychologically-transitional moments in Typee I attempt to navigate this tension, my goal an understanding of the extent to which Typee's narrator, Tommo, is able to realize the possibilities of laughing apocalypse. Briefly: we witness in Tommo a willingness to leap, to dare, to choose, to act—and to surrender to the unknown immediacy of that which is outside Self. Despite the persistence western-apocalyptic fears and anxieties, Tommo experiences an "elasticity of mind" which results in a significant psychological assimilation into a carnivalesque culture. While Typee's conclusion signals a recoil from carnivalesque possibility and a return to the Body-vilifying culture of western apocalypse, it retains an air of hope which persists—even as it fades—in much of post-Typee Melville.