Moby-Dick or, The Whale

by Melville, Herman; Hardwick, Elizabeth; Kent, Rockwell

• ISBN13: 9780679783275
• ISBN10: 067978327X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780553898101
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-10
• Publisher: Modern Library
• More Book Details

Summary

First published in 1851, Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature." The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale remains a peerless adventure story but one full of mythic grandeur, poetic majesty, and symbolic power. Filtered through the consciousness of the novel's narrator, Ishmael,Moby-Dickdraws us into a universe full of fascinating characters and stories, from the noble cannibal Queequeg to the natural history of whales, while reaching existential depths that excite debate and contemplation to this day. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains original illustrations by Rockwell Kent and commentary that includes excerpts from one of Melville's letters to Hawthorne.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Hardwick is the author of many books and essays

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Loomings	1	(8)
The Carpet-Bag	9	(7)
The Spouter-Inn	16	(20)
The Counterpane	36	(6)
Breakfast	42	(3)
The Street	45	(4)
The Chapel	49	(5)
The Pulpit	54	(4)
The Sermon	58	(12)
A Bosom Friend	70	(6)
Nightgown	76	(3)
Biographical	79	(5)
Wheelbarrow	84	(7)
Nantucket	91	(3)
Chowder	94	(5)
The Ship	99	(19)
The Ramadan	118	(8)
His Mark	126	(6)
The Prophet	132	(5)
All Astir	137	(4)
Going Aboard	141	(5)
Merry Christmas	146	(6)
The Lee Shore	152	(2)
The Advocate	154	(6)
Postscript	160	(2)
Knights and Squires	162	(6)
Knights and Squires	168	(7)
Ahab	175	(5)
Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb	180	(5)
The Pipe	185	(2)
Queen Mab	187	(3)
Cetology	190	(18)
The Specksynder	208	(4)
The Cabin-Table	212	(8)
The Mast-Head	220	(10)
The Quarter-Deck, Ahab and All	230	(11)
Sunset	241	(3)
Dusk	244	(2)
First Night-Watch	246	(2)
Forecastle--Midnight	248	(10)
Moby Dick	258	(14)
The Whiteness of the Whale	272	(12)
Hark!	284	(2)
The Chart	286	(7)
The Affidavit	293	(12)
Surmises	305	(5)
The Mat-Maker	310	(4)
The First Lowering	314	(15)
The Hyena	329	(3)
Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah	332	(4)
The Spirit-Spout	336	(7)
The Pequod Meets the Albatross	343	(3)
The Gam	346	(6)
The Town-Ho's Story	352	(27)
Monstrous Pictures of Whales	379	(7)
Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales	386	(6)
Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, & c.	392	(4)
Brit	396	(4)
Squid	400	(4)
The Line	404	(5)
Stubb Kills a Whale	409	(7)
The Dart	416	(3)
The Crotch	419	(2)
Stubb's Supper	421	(10)
The Whales as a Dish	431	(4)
The Shark Massacre	435	(3)
Cutting In	438	(3)
The Blanket	441	(5)
The Funeral	446	(2)
The Sphynx	448	(4)
The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam, Her Story	452	(9)
The Monkey-Rope	461	(6)
Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale	467	(8)
The Sperm Whale's Head	475	(6)
The Right Whale's Head	481	(5)
The Battering-Ram	486	(5)
The Great Heidelburgh Tun	491	(3)
Cistern and Buckets	494	(6)
The Praire	500	(4)
The Nut	504	(4)
The Pequod Meets the Virgin	508	(15)
The Honor and Glory of Whaling	523	(5)
Jonah Historically Regarded	528	(3)
Pitchpoling	531	(4)
The Fountain	535	(7)
The Tail	542	(7)
The Grand Armada	549	(17)
Schools and Schoolmasters	566	(5)
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish	571	(6)
Heads or Tails	577	(4)
The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud	581	(9)
Ambergris	590	(4)
The Castaway	594	(6)
A Squeeze of the Hand	600	(5)
The Cassock	605	(2)
The Try-Works	607	(6)
The Lamp	613	(1)
Stowing Down and Clearing Up	614	(4)
The Doubloon	618	(9)
The Pequod Meets the Samuel Enderby of London	627	(10)
The Decanter	637	(7)
A Bower in the Arsacides	644	(6)
Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton	650	(4)
The Fossil Whale	654	(5)
Does the Whale Diminish?	659	(7)
Ahab's Leg	666	(4)
The Carpenter	670	(4)
The Deck.Ahab and the Carpenter	674	(6)
The Cabin, Ahab and Starbuck	680	(4)
Queequeg in his Coffin	684	(8)
The Pacific	692	(2)
The Blacksmith	694	(4)
The Forge	698	(5)
The Gilder	703	(3)
The Pequod Meets the Bachelor	706	(4)
The Dying Whale	710	(3)
The Whale Watch	713	(2)
The Quadrant	715	(4)
The Candles	719	(9)
The Deck	728	(1)
Midnight, on the Forecastle	729	(3)
Midnight, Aloft	732	(1)
The Musket	733	(6)
The Needle	739	(5)
The Log and Line	744	(5)
The Life-Buoy	749	(5)
Ahab and the Carpenter	754	(3)
The Pequod Meets the Rachel	757	(6)
The Cabin, Ahab and Pip	763	(3)
The Hat	766	(6)
The Pequod Meets the Delight	772	(2)
The Symphony	774	(6)
The Chase--First Day	780	(14)
The Chase--Second Day	794	(12)
The Chase--Third Day	806	(19)
Epilogue	825	(2)
Notes	827	(16)
Commentary	843	(10)
Reading Group Guide	853

Excerpts

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.

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Excerpted from Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
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