Moby-Dick, or, The whale

Herman Melville, 1819-1891

Book - 2001

A nineteenth-century tale of life aboard a New England whaling ship whose captain is obsessed with the pursuit of a large white whale.

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Subjects
Genres
Psychological fiction
Action and adventure fiction
Sea fiction
Adventure fiction
Published
New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books 2001.
Language
English
Main Author
Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (-)
Edition
150th anniversary ed
Physical Description
xxxvii, 624 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780142000083
  • Foreword
  • Etymology
  • Extracts
  • Chapter 1. Loomings
  • Chapter 2. The Carpet Bag
  • Chapter 3. The Spouter-Inn
  • Chapter 4. The Counterpane
  • Chapter 5. Breakfast
  • Chapter 6. The Street
  • Chapter 7. The Chapel
  • Chapter 8. The Pulpit
  • Chapter 9. The Sermon
  • Chapter 10. A Bosom Friend
  • Chapter 11. Nightgown
  • Chapter 12. Biographical
  • Chapter 13. Wheelbarrow
  • Chapter 14. Nantucket
  • Chapter 15. Chowder
  • Chapter 16. The Ship
  • Chapter 17. The Ramadan
  • Chapter 18. His Mark
  • Chapter 19. The Prophet
  • Chapter 20. All Astir
  • Chapter 21. Going Aboard
  • Chapter 22. Merry Christmas
  • Chapter 23. The Lee Shore
  • Chapter 24. The Advocate
  • Chapter 25. Postscript
  • Chapter 26. Knights and Squires
  • Chapter 27. Knights and Squires
  • Chapter 28. Ahab
  • Chapter 29. Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb
  • Chapter 30. The Pipe
  • Chapter 31. Queen Mab
  • Chapter 32. Cetology
  • Chapter 33. The Specksynder
  • Chapter 34. The Cabin Table
  • Chapter 35. The Mast-Head
  • Chapter 36. The Quarter-Deck - Ahab and all
  • Chapter 37. Sunset
  • Chapter 38. Dusk
  • Chapter 39. First Night-Watch
  • Chapter 40. Forecastle--Midnight
  • Chapter 41. Moby Dick
  • Chapter 42. The Whiteness of the Whale
  • Chapter 43. Hark!
  • Chapter 44. The Chart
  • Chapter 45. The Affidavit
  • Chapter 46. Surmises
  • Chapter 47. The Mat-Maker
  • Chapter 48. The First Lowering
  • Chapter 49. The Hyena
  • Chapter 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew--Fedallah
  • Chapter 51. The Spirit-Spout
  • Chapter 52. The Pequod meets the Albatross
  • Chapter 53. The Gam
  • Chapter 54. The Town Ho's Story
  • Chapter 55. Monstrous Pictures of Whales
  • Chapter 56. Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales
  • Chapter 57. Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, andc.
  • Chapter 58. Brit
  • Chapter 59. Squid
  • Chapter 60. The Line
  • Chapter 61. Stubb kills a Whale
  • Chapter 62. The Dart
  • Chapter 63. The Crotch
  • Chapter 64. Stubb's Supper
  • Chapter 65. The Whale as a Dish
  • Chapter 66. The Shark Massacre
  • Chapter 67. Cutting In
  • Chapter 68. The Blanket
  • Chapter 69. The Funeral
  • Chapter 70. The Sphynx
  • Chapter 71. The Pequod meets the Jeroboam - Her Story
  • Chapter 72. The Monkey-rope
  • Chapter 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale
  • Chapter 74. The Sperm Whale's Head
  • Chapter 75. The Right Whale's Head
  • Chapter 76. The Battering-Ram
  • Chapter 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun
  • Chapter 78. Cistern and Buckets
  • Chapter 79. The Prairie
  • Chapter 80. The Nut
  • Chapter 81. The Pequod meets the Virgin
  • Chapter 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling
  • Chapter 83. Jonah Historically Regarded
  • Chapter 84. Pitchpoling
  • Chapter 85. The Fountain
  • Chapter 86. The Tail
  • Chapter 87. The Grand Armada
  • Chapter 88. Schools and Schoolmasters
  • Chapter 89. Fast Fish and Loose Fish
  • Chapter 90. Heads or Tails
  • Chapter 91. The Pequod meets the Rose Bud
  • Chapter 92. Ambergris
  • Chapter 93. The Castaway
  • Chapter 94. A Squeeze of the Hand
  • Chapter 95. The Cassock
  • Chapter 96. The Try-Works
  • Chapter 97. The Lamp
  • Chapter 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up
  • Chapter 99. The Doubloon
  • Chapter 100. The Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London
  • Chapter 101. The Decanter
  • Chapter 102. A Bower in the Arsacides
  • Chapter 103. Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton
  • Chapter 104. The Fossil Whale
  • Chapter 105. Does the Whale Diminish?
  • Chapter 106. Ahab's Leg
  • Chapter 107. The Carpenter
  • Chapter 108. The Deck - Ahab and the Carpenter
  • Chapter 109. The Cabin - Ahab and Starbuck
  • Chapter 110. Queequeg in his Coffin
  • Chapter 111. The Pacific
  • Chapter 112. The Blacksmith
  • Chapter 113. The Forge
  • Chapter 114. The Gilder
  • Chapter 115. The Pequod meets the Bachelor
  • Chapter 116. The Dying Whale
  • Chapter 117. The Whale-Watch
  • Chapter 118. The Quadrant
  • Chapter 119. The Candles
  • Chapter 120. The Deck
  • Chapter 121. Midnight, on the Forecastle
  • Chapter 122. Midnight, Aloft
  • Chapter 123. The Musket
  • Chapter 124. The Needle
  • Chapter 125. The Log and Line
  • Chapter 126. The Life-Buoy
  • Chapter 127. Ahab and the Carpenter
  • Chapter 128. The Pequod meets the Rachel
  • Chapter 129. The Cabin - Ahab and Pip
  • Chapter 130. The Hat
  • Chapter 131. The Pequod meets the Delight
  • Chapter 132. The Symphony
  • Chapter 133. The Chase - First Day
  • Chapter 134. The Chase - Second Day
  • Chapter 135. The Chase - Third Day
  • Epilogue
  • Map and Illustrations
Review by Library Journal Review

November 14 marks the 150th anniversary of Melville's salty saga of vengeance and obsession. Now a contender for the great American novel, this book was harpooned at the time of its 1851 publication by critics who found it overly long and boorish (observations no doubt still shared by countless high school students). They felt that like Ahab, the story didn't have much of a leg to stand on. The once lucrative whaling industry also was in its death throes and of little interest to readers. The book was forgotten for decades before being rediscovered in the 1920s by scholars who understood and appreciated the multilevel symbolism and allegory dismissed by their 19th-century predecessors. Melville published little after the failure of Moby-Dick and made his living as a customs inspector in New York City, where he was born in 1819 and died in complete obscurity in 1891. He is buried in the Bronx. This edition of his masterwork includes the full text along with illustrations of whales, whaling barks, and whaling instruments; maps; and a new introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick. A lot for the price. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Call me Ishmael. This resonant opening of Moby-Dick, the greatest novel in American literature, announces the narrator, Herman Melville, as he with a measure of slyness thought of himself. In the Scriptures Ishmael, a wild man sired by the overwhelming patriarch Abraham, was nevertheless the bastard son of a serving girl Hagar. The author himself was the offspring of two distinguished American families, the Melvilles of Boston and the Gansevoorts of Albany. Melville's father cast something of a blight on the family escutcheon by his tendency to bankruptcy which passed down to his son. Dollars damn me, the son was to say over and over. When he sat down in the green landscape of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to compose Moby-Dick he was in debt, the father of one son, and another to be born a few days after the publication of the novel in England. Melville had published five novels previous to Moby-Dick; the first two did well, and then with the capriciousness of the public the subsequent novels failed to please. He was a known literary figure with a fading reputation. How he came upon the courage to undertake the challenging creation of the epical battle between a sea creature, a white whale called Moby Dick, and an old captain from Nantucket by the name of Ahab is one of literature's triumphant mysteries. Add to that, as one reads, that he was only thirty-two years old. Ten years before, in 1841, he had signed up as a common seaman on the whaling vessel Acushnet bound for the South Seas. Young Ishmael was drawn by the lure of the sea and by the wonder of the whale itself, the Leviathan, the monarch of the deep, "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air." Until the discovery of petroleum oil in 1859 and Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp in 1879, whaling was a major commercial occupation in New England. Fortunes were made, grand houses were built, often with a "widow's walk" on the roof that testified to the great dangers of the enterprise. For the crew, service on a whaler was a drastic life of unremitting labor; foul, crowded quarters; bad food in scanty servings; contractual terms for years at miserable wages; brutalized companions picked up from all the ports of the world; tyrannical captains practicing a "sultanism" which Melville abhorred. A ship afloat is after all a prison. Melville was on three whalers in his four years at sea and from each, as we read in Typee and Omoo, the struggle is to escape, as he did when the boats anchored near exotic islands. He wrote about the misery of the whaling life, but not about whaling itself until he came to Moby-Dick. His imaginary whaler, the Pequod, death bound as it is, would be called, for an ordinary seaman, an agreeable berth. Ahab has no interest left beyond his internal struggle with one whale. Still, there is whaling, the presumption of it. When a whale is sighted small boats are detached from the main vessel and the men engage in a deadly battle to try to match, with flying harpoons, the whale's immense strength and desperation. If the great thing is captured, the deck of the main ship becomes an abattoir of blood and guts. The thick blubber is to be stripped, the huge head to be drained of its oils for soothing ambergris, for candles; the bones of the carcass make their way into corsets and umbrellas and scrimshaw trinkets. Moby-Dick is a history of cetology, an encylopedic telling of the qualities of the fin-back, the right whale, the hyena whale, the sperm whale, the killer whale, classified by size in mock academic form as folio, octavo, and so on. Information about a vanished world is one thing, but, above all else, this astonishing book is a human tragedy of almost supernatural suspensiveness, written in a rushing flow of imaginative language, poetical intensity, metaphor and adjective of consuming beauty. It begins on the cobbled streets of New Bedford, where Ishmael is to spend a few days before boarding the Pequod in Nantucket. The opening pages have a boyish charm as he is brought to share a bed with a fellow sailor, the harpooner Queequeg, an outrageously tattoed "primitive" who will be his companion throughout the narrative. Great ships under sail gave the old ports a rich heritage of myth, gossip, exaggeration, and rhetorical flights. Ishmael, on a Sunday, visits a whaleman's chapel to hear the incomparable sermon by Father Mapple on Jonah and the whale, a majestic interlude, one of many in this torrential outburst of fictional genius. As Ishmael and Queequeg proceed to Nantucket, the shadows of the plot begin to fall upon the pages. The recruits are interviewed by two retired sailors who will struggle to express the complicated nature of Captain Ahab. We learn that he has lost a leg, chewed off by a whale, and thus the fated voyage of the Pequod begins. Ahab has lost his leg to a white whale Moby Dick and is consumed with a passion for retribution. He will hunt the singular whale as a private destiny in the manner of ancient kings in a legendary world. However, Ahab is real and in command. The chief mate, Starbuck, understands the folly of the quest, the danger of it, and, as a thoughtful man longing to return to his wife and children, he will speak again and again the language of reason. "Vengeance on a dumb beast that simply smote thee from the blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous." The necessity of Starbuck's human distance from the implacable imperative of Ahab's quest illustrates the brilliant formation of this harrowing tale. But it is Ahab's story, his destiny, and, if on the one hand, he is a shabby, sea-worn sailor long mesmerized by mercurial oceans, he too has a wife at home and a child of his old age. We learn, as the story proceeds, that on a time ashore after his terrible wounding, he had fallen and by way of his whalebone leg been unmanned. He has suffered an incapacity not to be peacefully borne by one who in forty years had spent only three on land. Ahab knows the wild unsuitability of his nature, his remove from the common life. Excerpted from Moby Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.