Moby-Dick, or The Whale
Herman Melville, 1851
Signet : Penguin Group USA (cover image)
~500 pp. (varies by publisher)
ISBN-13: 9780451532282
Summary
It was an obsession that would destroy them all.
On a cold December night, a young man called Ishmael rents a room at an inn in Massachusetts. He has come from Manhattan to the north-east of America to sign up for a whaling expedition. Later that same night, as Ishmael is sleeping, a heavily tattooed man wielding a blade enters his room. This chance meeting is just the start of what will become the greatest adventure of his life.
The next day, Ishmael joins the crew of a ship known as the Pequod. He is approached by a man dressed in rags who warns him that, if he sails under the command of Captain Ahab, he may never come back. Undaunted, Ishmael returns early the next morning and leaves for the high seas. For the crew of the Pequod, their voyage is one of monetary gain.
For Captain Ahab, however, it is a mission driven by hatred, revenge, and his growing obsession with the greatest creature of the sea. (From the Campfire illustrated edition.)
More
Moby-Dick is at once a thrilling adventure tale, a timeless allegory, and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. At its heart is the powerful, unknowable sea—and Captain Ahab, a brooding, one-legged fanatic who has sworn vengeance on the mammoth white whale that crippled him.
Narrated by Ishmael, a wayfarer who joins the crew of Ahab’s whaling ship, this is the story of that hair-raising voyage, and of the men who embraced hardship and nameless horrors as they dared to challenge God’s most dreaded creation and death itself for a chance at immortality.
A novel that delves with astonishing vigor into the complex souls of men, Moby-Dick is an impassioned drama of the ultimate human struggle that the Atlantic Monthly called “the greatest of American novels.” (From the 2013 Signets Classics edition.)
Still more
Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself.
But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. (From the 2000 Penguin Classics edition.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 1, 1819
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Death—September 28, 1891
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Albany Academy until age 15
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet, whose work is often classified as part of the genre of dark romanticism. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and novella Billy Budd, the latter of which was published posthumously.
Melville was born in New York City in 1819, as the third child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. (After her husband Allan died, Maria added an "e" to the family surname.) Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan eventually declared bankruptcy, dying soon afterward and leaving his family penniless when Herman was 12.
Melville attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, and again from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics. Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a cabin boy on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.
After teaching for a stint (1837-1840), Melville spent the next four years at sea, travelling in the South Pacific Ocean, stopping off for periods in Hawaii and the Marquesas Islands (where he lived mong the Typee natives). He returned to Boston in 1844. These experiences were described in Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and White-Jacket (1850), which gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer.
In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Lemuel Shaw); the couple had four children, two sons and two daughters. In 1850 they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, now a museum. Here Melville lived for thirteen years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm. While living at Arrowhead, he befriended the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox. Melville, an intellectual loner for most of his life, was tremendously inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne during the period he was writing Moby-Dick (1851). Melville dedicated that work to Hawthorne, though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when Melville wrote Pierre (1852). Sadly, these works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books.
His The Confidence-Man (1857), winning general acclaim in modern times, received contemporary reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.
By 1866 his professional writing career can be said to have come to an end. To repair his faltering finances, Melville's wife and her relatives used their influence to obtain a position for him as customs inspector for the City of New York (a humble but adequately paying appointment), and he held the post for 19 years. In a notoriously corrupt institution, Melville soon won the reputation of being the only honest employee of the customs house.
As his professional fortunes waned, Melville's marriage was unhappy, plagued by rumors of his alcoholism and insanity and allegations that he inflicted physical abuse on his wife. Her relatives repeatedly urged her to leave him, and offered to have him committed as insane, but she refused.
In 1867 his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally. While Melville worked, his wife managed to wean him off alcohol, and he no longer showed signs of agitation or insanity. But recurring depression was added-to by the death of his second son, Stanwix, in San Francisco early in 1886.
Melville retired in 1886, after several of his wife's relatives died and left the couple legacies that Mrs. Melville administered with skill and good fortune.
Upon his death in September 1891, he left an unfinished piece; not until the literary scholar Raymond Weaver published it in 1924 did the book—which we now know as Billy Budd, Sailor—come to light. Later it was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, a play, and a film by Peter Ustinov. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
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The following is excerpted from the "Introduction" to Penguin Classic edition of Moby-Dick. For the longer—and very fine—version, visit the Penguin Group USA website.
Its reputation invariably preceding it, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is a novel like no other. Whether readers expect a subtle work of art, a rollicking adventure story, or a ponderous, inaccessible book, they come to this novel with a sense that the experience of reading it will be memorable. The story Melville tells is powerful and tragic—a whaling ship captain, obsessed with the animal that maimed him, pursues it to the point of destroying himself and his crew, except for Ishmael, the novel's narrator. But the plot of Moby-Dick is little more than a variation on those used by countless authors both before and after Melville. It is the way Melville tells the story that makes the novel incomparable. In fact, how a story is told and, more generally, how we interpret our experiences become as much the subject of the novel as Ahab's hunt for the white whale. As relentlessly as Ahab chases Moby Dick, so Melville questions the nature of the interaction between the mind and the external world. (Continue reading...)
Discussion Questions
(Below are two sets of questions: one from Penguin Group USA and other other from Random House Publishing Group.)
1. Why does the novel's narrator begin his story with "Call me Ishmael"?
2. How does Ishmael's relationship to Queequeg change from the time they meet to the sailing of the Pequod?
3. Why does Melville include stage directions in some chapters (e.g., "The Quarter-Deck")?
4. Why does Ahab pursue Moby Dick so single-mindedly?
5. Why does Melville have Fedallah offer a prophesy that Ahab interprets in his favor, but which turns out otherwise?
6. Why does Starbuck decide against killing Ahab, despite believing that it is the only way to "survive to hug his wife and child again"? Why does Starbuck fail to convince Ahab to give up his pursuit of Moby Dick ("The Symphony")?
7. Why does Ahab offer the doubloon to the first member of the crew to spot Moby Dick?
8. Why does Ishmael digress from his story to meditate on the meaning of whiteness ("The Whiteness of the Whale")?
9. Why does Melville begin the novel by adhering to the conventions and limitations of a first-person narrator, but violate them later?
10. Why is Ishmael so concerned with past efforts to represent whales, in writing as well as other media, and the extent to which these efforts have succeeded or failed?
11. Why does Ishmael include in his story so many details about life and work aboard a whaling ship?
12. Does the novel support or undermine Ishmael's contention that "some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth"?
13. Why does the coffin prepared for Queequeg become Ishmael's life buoy once the Pequod sinks?
14. Who or what is primarily responsible for the destruction of the Pequod and, except for Ishmael, her crew?"
15. Why does the Rachel rescue Ishmael?
16. How has his experience aboard the Pequod affected Ishmael?
17. On what basis should we determine the point at which ambition turns into obsession?
18. Is knowledge always at least partly harmful, either in its application or the cost of acquiring it?
(Questions issued by Penguin.)
1. What is the significance of the whale? What do you think Melville intends in developing such a vicious antagonism between Ahab and the whale?
2. How does the presence of Queequeg, particularly his status as a "savage," inform the novel? How does Melville depict this cultural clash?
3. How does whaling as an industry function metaphorically throughout the novel? Where does man fit in in this scenario?
4. Melville explores the divide between evil and virtue, justice and vengeance throughout the novel. What, ultimately, is his conclusion? What is Ahab's?
5. What do you think of the role, if any, played by religion in the novel? Do you think religious conventions are replaced or subverted in some way? Discuss.
6. Discuss the novel's philosophical subtext. How does this contribute to the basic plot involving Ahab's search for the whale? Is this Ishmael's purpose in the novel?
7. Discuss the role of women in the novel. What does their conspicuous absence mean in the overall context of the novel?
(Questions issued by Random House.)