MOBY DICK

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• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist. Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a "Great American Novel" was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written the book himself,[1] and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".[2] Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.[3]

PLOT

• Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed Polynesian Queequeg, a harpooneer whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah, then head for Nantucket. Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod. Peleg describes Captain Ahab: "He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless "has his humanities". They hire Queequeg the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. While provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, the Pequod leaves the harbor. Ishmael discusses cetology (the zoological classification and natural history of the whale), and describes the crew members. The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head, and the third mate is Flask, also from Martha's Vineyard, short, stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident of Nantucket. When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck, he announces he is out for revenge on the white whale which took one leg from the knee down and left him with a prosthesis fashioned from a whale's jawbone. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon, a gold coin, which he nails to the mast. Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. Ahab's purpose exercises a mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine". Instead of rounding Cape Horn, Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa. One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat — "its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg's sword chance" — Tashtego sights a sperm whale. Five previously unknown men appear on deck and are revealed to be a special crew selected by Ahab. Their leader, Fedallah, a Parsee, is Ahab's harpooneer. The pursuit is unsuccessful. Moby Dick Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod makes the first of nine sea-encounters, or "gams", with other ships: Ahab hails the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into the sea before he can answer. Ishmael explains that because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sails on without the customary "gam", which defines as a "social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships", in which the two captains remain on one ship and the chief mates on the other. In the second gam off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho, a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a "judgment of God" is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale. Ishmael digresses on pictures of whales, brit (microscopic sea creatures on which whales feed), squid and — after four boats lowered in vain because Daggoo mistook a giant squid for the white whale — whale-lines. The next day, in the Indian Ocean, Stubb kills a sperm whale, and that night Fleece, the Pequod's black cook, prepares him a rare whale steak. Fleece delivers a sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale's carcass, tied to the ship, saying that their nature is to be voracious, but they must overcome it. The whale is prepared, beheaded, and barrels of oil are tried out. Standing at the head of the whale, Ahab begs it to speak of the depths of the sea. The Pequod next encounters the Jeroboam, which not only lost its chief mate to Moby Dick, but also is now plagued by an epidemic. The whale carcass still lies in the water. Queequeg mounts it, tied to Ishmael's belt by a monkey-rope as if they were Siamese twins. Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to a yardarm opposite the sperm whale's head. Ishmael compares the two heads in a philosophical way: the right whale is Lockean, stoic, and the sperm whale as Kantean, platonic. Tashtego cuts into the head of the sperm whale and retrieves buckets of oil. He falls into the head, and the head falls off the yardarm into the sea. Queequeg dives after him and frees his mate with his sword.

THEMES

• Biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant sees epistemology as the book's theme. Ishmael's taxonomy of whales merely demonstrates "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of achieving certainty". She also contrasts Ishmael and Ahab's attitudes toward life, with Ishmael's open-minded and meditative, "polypositional stance" as antithetical to Ahab's monomania, adhering to dogmatic rigidity.[21] Melville biographer Delbanco cites race as an example of this search for truth beneath surface differences. All races are represented among the crew members of the Pequod. Although Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed cannibal, he soon decides, "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."[22] While it may be rare for a mid-19th century American book to feature black characters in a nonslavery context, slavery is frequently mentioned. The theme of race is primarily carried by Pip, the diminutive black cabin boy.[23] When Pip has almost drowned, Ahab, genuinely touched by Pip's suffering, questions him gently, Pip "can only parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward for Pip!'".[24] Editors Bryant and Springer suggest perception is a central theme, the difficulty of seeing and understanding, which makes deep reality hard to discover and truth hard to pin down. Ahab explains that, like all things, the evil whale wears a disguise: "All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks" — and Ahab is determined to "strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside, except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall" (Ch. 36, "The Quarter-Deck"). This theme pervades the novel, perhaps never so emphatically as in "The Doubloon" (Ch. 99), where each crewmember perceives the coin in a way shaped by his own personality. Later, the American edition has Ahab "discover no sign" (Ch. 133) of the whale when he is staring into the deep. In fact, Moby Dick is then swimming up at him. In the British edition, Melville changed the word "discover" to "perceive", and with good reason, for "discovery" means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better still, perception, is "a matter of shaping what exists by the way in which we see it".[25] The point is not that Ahab would discover the whale as an object, but that he would perceive it as a symbol of his making
• Ram22jos@claibornecsd.org

MY OPINION ON THE BOOK

• I thought it was a great mix of action and drama it was exciting i guess you could say i would definitely recommend it