Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Melville, Herman; Hovde, Carl F.; Hovde, Carl F.

ISBN13:
9781593080181
ISBN10:
1593080182
Format: Paperback
Copyright: 2003-04-01
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
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Summary

On a previous voyage, a mysterious white whale had ripped off the leg of a sea captain named Ahab. Now the crew of the Pequod, on a pursuit that features constant adventure and horrendous mishaps, must follow the mad Ahab into the abyss to satisfy his unslakeable thirst for vengeance. Narrated by the cunningly observant crew member Ishmael,Moby-Dickis the tale of the hunt for the elusive, omnipotent, and ultimately mystifying white whale--Moby Dick. On its surface,Moby-Dickis a vivid documentary of life aboard a nineteenth-century whaler, a virtual encyclopedia of whales and whaling, replete with facts, legends, and trivia thatMelvillehad gleaned from personal experience and scores of sources. But as the quest for the whale becomes increasingly perilous, the tale works on allegorical levels, likening the whale to human greed, moral consequence, good, evil, and life itself. Who is good? The great white whale who, like Nature, asks nothing but to be left in peace? Or the bold Ahab who, like scientists, explorers, and philosophers, fearlessly probes the mysteries of the universe? Who is evil? The ferocious, man-killing sea monster? Or the revenge-obsessed madman who ignores his own better nature in his quest to kill the beast? Scorned by critics upon its publication,Moby-Dickwas publicly derided during its author's lifetime. Yet Melville's masterpiece has outlived its initial misunderstanding to become an American classic of unquestionably epic proportions. Includes an extensive Dictionary of Sea Terms (37 pages).

Author Biography

Carl F. Hovde taught at Columbia University for thirty-five years. An editor for the Princeton University Press edition of Henry David Thoreau, he has also written about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, and William Faulkner.

Loomings	p. 14
The Carpet-Bag	p. 18
The Spouter-Inn	p. 21
The Counterpane	p. 33
Breakfast	p. 36
The Street	p. 37
The Chapel	p. 39
The Pulpit	p. 42
The Sermon	p. 44
A Bosom Friend	p. 51
Nightgown	p. 54
Biographical	p. 55
Wheelbarrow	p. 57
Nantucket	p. 61
Chowder	p. 62
The Ship	p. 65
The Ramadan	p. 76
His Mark	p. 81
The Prophet	p. 84
All Astir	p. 86
Going Aboard	p. 88
Merry Christmas	p. 91
The Lee Shore	p. 94
The Advocate	p. 95
Postscript	p. 99
Knights and Squires	p. 99
Knights and Squires	p. 102
Ahab	p. 105
Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb	p. 108
The Pipe	p. 110
Queen Mab	p. 111
Cetology	p. 113
The Specksynder	p. 123
The Cabin-Table	p. 125
The Mast-Head	p. 130
The Quarter-Deck	p. 135
Sunset	p. 141
Dusk	p. 142
First Night-Watch	p. 143
Midnight, Forecastle	p. 144
Moby Dick	p. 149
The Whiteness of the Whale	p. 157
Hark!	p. 164
The Chart	p. 165
The Affidavit	p. 169
Surmises	p. 176
The Mat-Maker	p. 178
The First Lowering	p. 180
The Hyena	p. 189
Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah	p. 190
The Spirit-Spout	p. 192
The Albatross	p. 195
The Gam	p. 197
The Town-Ho's Story	p. 200
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales	p. 217
Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes	p. 220
Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars	p. 223
Brit	p. 225
Squid	p. 227
The Line	p. 229
Stubb Kills a Whale	p. 232
The Dart	p. 236
The Crotch	p. 237
Stubb's Supper	p. 238
The Whale as a Dish	p. 245
The Shark Massacre	p. 247
Cutting In	p. 248
The Blanket	p. 250
The Funeral	p. 252
The Sphynx	p. 253
The Jeroboam's Story	p. 255
The Monkey-Rope	p. 260
Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him	p. 263
The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View	p. 268
The Right Whale's Head--Contrasted View	p. 271
The Battering-Ram	p. 273
The Great Heidelburgh Tun	p. 275
Cistern and Buckets	p. 277
The Prairie	p. 280
The Nut	p. 282
The Pequod Meets the Virgin	p. 284
The Honor and Glory of Whaling	p. 293
Jonah Historically Regarded	p. 295
Pitchpoling	p. 297
The Fountain	p. 298
The Tail	p. 302
The Grand Armada	p. 306
Schools and Schoolmasters	p. 316
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish	p. 318
Heads or Tails	p. 321
The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud	p. 324
Ambergris	p. 329
The Castaway	p. 331
A Squeeze of the Hand	p. 334
The Cassock	p. 337
The Try-Works	p. 338
The Lamp	p. 342
Stowing Down and Clearing Up	p. 342
The Doubloon	p. 344
Leg and Arm. The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London	p. 349
The Decanter	p. 355
A Bower in the Arsacides	p. 358
Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton	p. 362
The Fossil Whale	p. 364
Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?	p. 367
Ahab's Leg	p. 370
The Carpenter	p. 372
Ahab and the Carpenter	p. 374
Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin	p. 377
Queequeg in His Coffin	p. 379
The Pacific	p. 384
The Blacksmith	p. 385
The Forge	p. 387
The Gilder	p. 390
The Pequod Meets the Bachelor	p. 391
The Dying Whale	p. 393
The Whale Watch	p. 394
The Quadrant	p. 395
The Candles	p. 397
The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch	p. 402
Midnight--The Forecastle Bulwarks	p. 403
Midnight Aloft--Thunder and Lightning	p. 404
The Musket	p. 404
The Needle	p. 407
The Log and Line	p. 410
The Life-Buoy	p. 412
The Deck	p. 415
The Pequod Meets the Rachel	p. 417
The Cabin	p. 419
The Hat	p. 421
The Pequod Meets the Delight	p. 424
The Symphony	p. 425
The Chase--First Day	p. 428
The Chase--Second Day	p. 436
The Chase--Third Day	p. 443
Epilogue	p. 452
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

From Carl F. Hovde's Introduction to Moby-Dick

It is clear that Melville is not Ahab, nor is he Ishmael, though here the relationship is more complicated. "Call me Ishmael," chapter I begins: The borrowed name lets us know that he will tell us only what he wants to, and that he is a man apart from his fellows. The biblical Ishmael is the illegitimate son of Abraham by Rebecca's servant Hagar, and even though the Lord is good to Ishmael later in Genesis, his half-brother, Isaac, inherits the Lord's covenant through their father (Genesis 16, 17, 21, and 25).

Melville's narrator promptly describes dark thoughts approaching self-destruction: He pauses before coffin warehouses and follows every funeral he meets. But in the novel things don't remain so grim for long. Just as the Lord in Genesis is good to Ishmael despite his illegitimacy, so Melville's Ishmael floats to rescue with his best friend's burial box. The image of death has become the means to life, a change typical of Melville's density of view and sense of ambiguity. And the narrator's depressions spoken of at the beginning are modulated by the very language in which they are described: He is serious in describing his "spleen" and the "drizzly November" in his soul, but he presents them in a way that masks the pain even as it bodies it forth. The joking tone in which that account is developed is one we hear very often from the narrator even when he speaks of serious things.

The Ishmael we hear at the beginning is in some ways the book's most illusive character because, just as the biblical name suggests an outsider, a wanderer of sorts, he wanders in and out of the novel's narrative voice as it moves along. In the early chapters he is fully present as a character as he leads us toward the Pequod, but once on board he soon melds into the crew as his storytelling duties are taken over by the much more knowledgeable narrator whose arrival is not announced, but whose presence is clear as early as chapter XXIX when we overhear an exchange between Ahab and Stubb, the second mate.

They are on the quarterdeck, where Ishmael, as a common seaman, has no right to be unless working, and even if he were he could not overhear Stubb's private thoughts as he descends into the cabin. There is much in the book that Ishmael the crew member could not see or overhear: conversations between the ship's officers, Ahab's behavior at dinner with his officers, to say nothing of Ahab's private thoughts in a dramatic monologue complete with stage directions. In "Sunset" (chap. XXXVII), the scene is "The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out." As in the preceding chapter, "The Quarter Deck" (chap. XXXVI), we have suddenly changed literary genres-we are for a short time in a play, not a novel.

As the action requires of him, Ishmael now and then returns as a man with a particular role on the ship, someone who could not have the wider knowledge we are often given. In chapter LXXII he is at one end of a rope with Queequeg at the other; in chapter XCIV he is squeezing coagulated oil back into liquid; in chapter XCVI he almost capsizes the ship; in the Epilogue he is floating with Queequeg's coffin so that the ship Rachel can bring him back to tell the story.

These are inconsistencies, but how bothersome are they? Most readers have not been much troubled. Both narrators have the same voice and personality-one simply becomes the other, and it is best to think of them as the Ishmael who acts and the Ishmael who narrates, two functions of the same identity. Often enough we may not even notice the change from one to the other because we are caught up in the action and the strange brilliance of the style.

The book's general narrator occupies a position between Ishmael, on the one hand, and Melville, on the other. We don't confuse Melville with the other two-that shared personality is the author's construction to serve his ends. But it is true that Moby-Dick is an opinionated work, and it is not surprising that the narrator sometimes expresses views that we assume to be Melville's. This is true, for example, in "The Ship" (chap. XVI), where Melville seems to wonder what it will take to turn an old American sea captain into a noble figure worthy of the greatest classical tragedies. The paragraph is a virtual recipe for what Melville will do in creating Ahab later in the book, so much so that he might have written it after he had largely finished with Ahab, and placed it early in the book as a sign of what is to come.

There are also passages in which the narrator expresses directly to the reader opinions that are appropriate to the text and are views that Melville clearly held. After explaining how property rights are established after a dead whale is temporarily abandoned, he asks, "What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish! And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?" We should be annoyed if we thought that the story line were there only to set us up for the generalization, but Melville's gifts as a storyteller prevent this: The comment rises from the action. While the passage is not about Ahab, it implies what is wrong with him-in his arrogance and isolation he denies the inevitable interdependence of personal identity and community, one of the novel's great themes.

In a novel where ambition reaches out to some of the largest matters-man's position in the natural world, the nature of charismatic rule in its moral dimensions, the very nature of reality itself-there are notable exclusions in Moby-Dick, though not through oversight. Important aspects of daily life are less represented than one would usually expect in a novel: Food, sleep, hygiene, pastimes are hardly present, nor matters of health-important on such a vessel-except for Queequeg's illness.

These exclusions come about because the literary genre closest to Moby-Dick is not the traditional prose narrative, but the epic-a form in which the texture of common life is often treated lightly to allow concentration on the protagonist and heroic action. After the nights and steaks in New Bedford's Spouter Inn and the meals of Mrs. Hussey's Nantucket chowder, there is little detail of this kind once the Pequod leaves the dock, with four-fifths of the novel still to come.

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.

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Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

9781593080181

1593080182

Supplemental Materials

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program