Herman Melville

"Presents the text and critical analysis of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick, ' and includes reviews and letters by Melville.". *** "An authoritative text, before 'Moby Dick, ' international controversy, reviews and letters by Melville, analogues and sources, reviews of 'Moby-Dick, ' criticism."

Moby-Dick

Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, "Moby-Dick" 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.

Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale

Soham Dasgupta

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness

In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?

And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity.

Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body?

Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then?

For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.

That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life.

he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.

Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but, man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’

old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house.

justine lim

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster -- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

or, The whale

Moby Dick

Moby Dick is one of those novels that tend to linger on a bookshelf or a to-be-read pile, it's intimidating aura stopping one from picking it up, it's reputation as legendary and its inclusion in the ‘greatest of all time’ lists repelling you to save it for a perfect moment when you’re ‘ready.’ Well, I thought I was ready, but no matter how ready I was (I knew I was getting into a book with a lot of ‘descriptions of whaling’), I still ended up completely shocked with how unique and experimental and groundbreaking this novel is, especially being released when it was, before the advent of modernism and postmodernism and the experimental fiction we know of today. You think you’d be going on a simple nautical ride with poetic imagery, much like the Joseph Conrad novels I’ve read, but what you end up with is, like our protagonist Ishmael himself, a journey bigger and more significant than the physical act itself.

The novel is a whaling epic around 630 pages long. It has 135 chapters and an epilogue, giving it an average chapter length of 4-5 pages. The book describes the ship Pequod’s journey around the world on its quest, under its obsessive command of Captain Ahab, to enact the Captain’s revenge by killing a snow-white sperm whale who took off his leg years ago, the titular Moby-Dick. But the novel isn’t solely focussed on that journey. In fact, many chapters are not related to the plot at all, but are self-contained explorations of something to do with whales, whaling, or the whale boat, and the sheer extent of these chapters is one of the first things an unwarned reader like me was surprised by. 

Or, perhaps, surprised is the wrong word. I had in fact been warned that many chapters were ancillary to the main plot; that Ishmael, our protagonist, goes into long diatribes, outside of the main chronology, to explain everything about whaling (often described by the novel’s detractors with an eye-roll). I was fine with that, expecting these chapters to be like the farming scenes in Anna Karenina, where, sure, Tolstoy goes into the economics of farming and 19th Century Russia, but all that information is filtered through this yearning of Levin, who is clearly trying to intellectualise the big God-shaped hole in his life.

You get none of that with Ishmael. Instead of looking for God, in first-person narration, Ishmael seems like a trickster god himself, cheekily describing all aspects of whaling in this poetical, sardonic voice, in a way that is so detached from his material reality on the ship that he becomes a non-entity. This is exactly what happens, and is intentional by Melville, who sneakily shifts the narration to a third-person omniscient when the ship sets sail. At that point, Ishmael becomes inhuman, the novel becomes unconcerned with his feelings and motivations, and all shifts to the crewmates (that is, when the plot is being described), especially the obsessive Captain Ahab, and his mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. It’s a simple but effective metaphor of the single-mindedness of the ship, of the infallible chain of command tied to Ahab, and the single-track, fatalistic nature of its journey to kill the White Whale. 

At some points these non-plot chapters are annoying (I’m looking at you, the chapter dedicated to whale phrenology), but, on the whole, I enjoyed these chapters quite a bit. In a weird way, Melville’s/Ishmael’s obsession with whales had rubbed off on me (which is entirely due to its many wonderful Odes throughout the novel), so, aside from the beautiful prose style Melville uses to describe their anatomy, history, symbolism, and commerce, I found myself just enjoying the chapters as really fun non-fiction. And the whale as a symbol is so beautiful and sublime that, once you’ve stuck with the premise of the whale being something grander and more significant than itself, you’re pretty much right in the novel’s grasp, and it can do what it likes, plot or no plot.

I am ignorant of a lot of the Western canon and the Bible, so a lot of the allusions were lost to me. But what has stuck with me is that image of the whaleboat, lit by candles and furnace fire, drifting through the night, seeking out leviathans to stab, cut, dissect, extract, and boil, all in gory, anatomical detail, by this crew of all nationalities and creeds, drifting through the sea for years, never touching land, floating like a spectre through eternity. And their prey, that primordial, ancient being, so reflected in mythology and so venerated throughout. It’s a demonic, random force, drifting and killing like a pathogen, a force of nature in itself as much as the sea it purports to conquer. 

That image is powerful on its own; one can read a million interpretations of the symbolism, but as I keep picturing the white whale and the boat and the sea, I slowly but surely understood the brilliance of the novel. Beyond everything else, beyond its exploration of humanity, obsession, race, religion, capitalism, authoritarianism, fatalism (and there are plenty of things to talk about here, but I have little space), beyond all this is a beautiful, poetic stream of images that is so sublimely inspiring.

Just meditating on the image last night pushed The Whale one half-star higher in my rating. I fear that it is a book that has permanently altered my brain. Had it explored the shipmates, Ishmael, and the relationships between the crew just a little more, it would have topped out, as I love people more than things, but that’s on me more than Melville.

shain

Moby Dick is one of those novels that tend to linger on a bookshelf or a to-be-read pile, it's intimidating aura stopping one from picking it up, it's reputation as legendary and its inclusion in the ‘greatest of all time’ lists repelling you to save it for a perfect moment when you’re ‘ready.’ Well, I thought I was ready, but no matter how ready I was (I knew I was getting into a book with a lot of ‘descriptions of whaling’), I still ended up completely shocked with how unique and experimental and groundbreaking this novel is, especially being released when it was, before the advent of modernism and postmodernism and the experimental fiction we know of today. You think you’d be going on a simple nautical ride with poetic imagery, much like the Joseph Conrad novels I’ve read, but what you end up with is, like our protagonist Ishmael himself, a journey bigger and more significant than the physical act itself.

The novel is a whaling epic around 630 pages long. It has 135 chapters and an epilogue, giving it an average chapter length of 4-5 pages. The book describes the ship Pequod’s journey around the world on its quest, under its obsessive command of Captain Ahab, to enact the Captain’s revenge by killing a snow-white sperm whale who took off his leg years ago, the titular Moby-Dick. But the novel isn’t solely focussed on that journey. In fact, many chapters are not related to the plot at all, but are self-contained explorations of something to do with whales, whaling, or the whale boat, and the sheer extent of these chapters is one of the first things an unwarned reader like me was surprised by. 

Or, perhaps, surprised is the wrong word. I had in fact been warned that many chapters were ancillary to the main plot; that Ishmael, our protagonist, goes into long diatribes, outside of the main chronology, to explain everything about whaling (often described by the novel’s detractors with an eye-roll). I was fine with that, expecting these chapters to be like the farming scenes in Anna Karenina, where, sure, Tolstoy goes into the economics of farming and 19th Century Russia, but all that information is filtered through this yearning of Levin, who is clearly trying to intellectualise the big God-shaped hole in his life.

You get none of that with Ishmael. Instead of looking for God, in first-person narration, Ishmael seems like a trickster god himself, cheekily describing all aspects of whaling in this poetical, sardonic voice, in a way that is so detached from his material reality on the ship that he becomes a non-entity. This is exactly what happens, and is intentional by Melville, who sneakily shifts the narration to a third-person omniscient when the ship sets sail. At that point, Ishmael becomes inhuman, the novel becomes unconcerned with his feelings and motivations, and all shifts to the crewmates (that is, when the plot is being described), especially the obsessive Captain Ahab, and his mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. It’s a simple but effective metaphor of the single-mindedness of the ship, of the infallible chain of command tied to Ahab, and the single-track, fatalistic nature of its journey to kill the White Whale. 

At some points these non-plot chapters are annoying (I’m looking at you, the chapter dedicated to whale phrenology), but, on the whole, I enjoyed these chapters quite a bit. In a weird way, Melville’s/Ishmael’s obsession with whales had rubbed off on me (which is entirely due to its many wonderful Odes throughout the novel), so, aside from the beautiful prose style Melville uses to describe their anatomy, history, symbolism, and commerce, I found myself just enjoying the chapters as really fun non-fiction. And the whale as a symbol is so beautiful and sublime that, once you’ve stuck with the premise of the whale being something grander and more significant than itself, you’re pretty much right in the novel’s grasp, and it can do what it likes, plot or no plot.

I am ignorant of a lot of the Western canon and the Bible, so a lot of the allusions were lost to me. But what has stuck with me is that image of the whaleboat, lit by candles and furnace fire, drifting through the night, seeking out leviathans to stab, cut, dissect, extract, and boil, all in gory, anatomical detail, by this crew of all nationalities and creeds, drifting through the sea for years, never touching land, floating like a spectre through eternity. And their prey, that primordial, ancient being, so reflected in mythology and so venerated throughout. It’s a demonic, random force, drifting and killing like a pathogen, a force of nature in itself as much as the sea it purports to conquer. 

That image is powerful on its own; one can read a million interpretations of the symbolism, but as I keep picturing the white whale and the boat and the sea, I slowly but surely understood the brilliance of the novel. Beyond everything else, beyond its exploration of humanity, obsession, race, religion, capitalism, authoritarianism, fatalism (and there are plenty of things to talk about here, but I have little space), beyond all this is a beautiful, poetic stream of images that is so sublimely inspiring.

Just meditating on the image last night pushed The Whale one half-star higher in my rating. I fear that it is a book that has permanently altered my brain. Had it explored the shipmates, Ishmael, and the relationships between the crew just a little more, it would have topped out, as I love people more than things, but that’s on me more than Melville.

Moby Dick (Penguin Classics)

hyun

Holy shit. One of the best-written books I've read. A classic. The language is dated, so are the technologies, but very much worth pushing through and trying to understand the picture being painted. The characters are all full of life, and their interactions with each other make this novel a journey worth following. It also helps that I have a personal interest with sailing.

Throckmorton

Absolutely ridiculous, a freaking masterpiece, I love this book!!!

Sam Sontag

Moby Dick; or, The Whale

There is an interesting story here, but I do wish less of it was buried under pages and pages of whaling minutiae. It's hard to reconcile rating the story I did enjoy with the annoyance I felt every time it ground to a halt to make room for entire chapters dedicated to whale trivia.

Sivani

Bria

I really could’ve gone my whole life without reading this

 is not about hunting a whale. it is about life. this book is one of greatest novels which is written, indeed and also I should tell  : this book is so difficult to read,  of course not as much as hunting the real whale😊

Shidehdeishidi

A masterpiece.it is not about hunting a whale. it is about life. this book is one of greatest novels which is written, indeed and also I should tell  : this book is so difficult to read,  of course not as much as hunting the real whale😊

Woe! I feel grandly afflicted—but it is from the fabric of the book, not what the tapestry is depicting; which culminates to a picture of no great effect or compulsion. Many profundities jump out like silk in hessian, often knotted silk: that unfurls like a furtive note-passed into an embroidery of words marvel often isn’t an effusive enough term for. But these knots of obscured meaning can be crumpled so tightly or passed so incessantly it becomes Herculean to keep abreast while retaining sight of the picture being woven at the front of class. But then when we are without these silken reveries my fingers shear raw running along the acres of dry, dense whaling imagery. There is a tale hidden in Moby Dick, but we are shared the fable of the whale’s bowels rather than of Jonah.

Geese Fish

A masterful adaptation of the timeless literary classic, faithfully and beautifully rendered by an award-winning artist. In striking black-and-white illustrations, Chabouté retells the story of the Great American Novel. Captain Ahab strikes out on a voyage, obsessively seeking revenge on the great white whale that took his leg. This hardcover edition collects both of the Vents d'Ouest volumes, printed in English for the first time.

Tobias V. Langhoff

The main focus of this adaptation is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Ahab's madness. The story's pacing is excellent, and really helps to show his monomaniacal nature, like how he wins over the crew and how Starbuck grows more and more disillusioned with the crazy old man.

The omissions and changes from the source material all seem sensible and logically considered. The character of Pip, for example, is omitted, but an unnamed (and unseen, except for in silhouette) falls overboard at one point and is seen no more. This was presumably a nod to Pip. His death is used to set up an important plot point: The crew throw out a buoy for him, but fail to retrieve him, and it's the loss of this buoy that prompts them to refurnish Queequeg's coffin canoe into a makeshift buoy.

All in all, though, a lot of the plot remains intact (which cannot be said for Will Eisner's 32 page adaptation). The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg gets the room it deserves. Many pages (although not as many as in the novel, perhaps just as well) are spent on presenting the whaling business, such as a long scene with no dialogue where the crew turns whale blubber into oil. The three gams with other whaling ships are also present, which help focus the story on Ahab's descent into madness.

The art is fantastic. The stark black and white wood carving style drawings make it stand among the classical Moby-Dick illustrators like Rockwell Kent and Barry Moser (as well as the modern Evan Dahm), and many of the comic panels in this book could very well be singled out and put into a regular, illustrated version of the novel. I was also reminded of Mike Mignola.

Shortly put, one of (if not the) best comic adaptations of a novel I've ever read. Great stuff.

This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of Moby-Dick used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library.

This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased.

Moby Dick or, The Whale

I doubt there’s much I can contribute about this book. As most classic books that have entered popular culture, however, this novel was very different from what I imagined. (My main impressions of it actually came from Bone!)

As I often do when I read less approachable classics, I alternated between reading this book and listening to the audiobook Moby Dick. Firstly because Amazon Kindle and Audible offered the ebook and audiobook package for free, with Whispersync for Voice, but also because it was read by the late and great Frank Muller, who brought me to The Dark Tower. He performs a very different feat here, and delivers a masterful reading of dense and arcane prose that I often devoured as text, but just as often found a slog to read through myself (but devoured audibly).

An example of the latter: At one point the riveting storytelling abruptly stops, and for a chapter the author/narrator gives a primer on 19th century cetology, in which he argues that Linnaeus was wrong and that whales are not mammals after all, and makes up his own names for some whale species. In another memorable passage, the minuta of the coiling of a harpoon line drag on for so long that you will inevitably skim large parts of it. I’m proud to say that I listened to the entirety of it in the audiobook, however; and the reason I’m proud of it is because it didn’t give me anything beyond bragging rights.

Now, the audiobook and the paperback book I alternated between are both classified as “books”, the family of media in which words are collected, and it is hard to discern why. They both belong to the subclassification “novel”, to be sure, as the words contained therein are sufficiently numerous (otherwise they would be “novellas” or “short stories”) and of a cohesive story-telling character (lest it be a of a more “poetic” form) which is fictional (or else they would be “non fiction”, a wide category in its own right, among other sub categories containing “biographies” and “history books”). But why both adaptations of the novel are “books” is, in my view, merely a cultural and historical matter, for the original etymology of the word does not have a clear connection to the bits and bytes contained in the audio file which carries the narrator’s voice.

Do you get the gist? This sort of thing happens frequently in the book.

For the most part, though, the book is full of exciting action, interesting philosophical musings and great humor. It’s a long book, often meandering, but it really is fantastic. The biblical allusions are well known, but Melville doesn’t try to hide them; the chapter where a sermon about Jonah and the whale takes place is fantastically written and one of my favorites. For some reason I always thought the savage cannibal Queequeg would be introduced in a far more unsettling (to the protagonist Ishmael, at least) manner, but the goofy friendship of Ishmael and his stoic sidekick Queequeg is hearty. Unsurprisingly, Captain Ahab is more unsettling, but even he is in some ways painted more as a silly and crazy uncle than what I expected from countless references in media. The three ultimate chapters of the book are as nail-biting as any suspense thriller I have read (”To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”), but their impact is stronger when you have already been on a long and tiresome adventure with the doomed crew, and see the various prophecies sprinkled through the tale come true.

Although whaling is today viewed as a barbaric pastime of the days of old, and rightly so, my Norwegian cultural heritage (for we still perform this brutal and cruel hunt) made me somewhat appreciative of the way this novel paints it as a noble and adventurous profession. Albeit a foreigner, I think I can understand parts of the American history it draws upon, such as the role Nantucket played in the US coastline, although the cultural influence of the Quakers was not readily connectable. (Interestingly, Nantucket’s whaling industry died together with slavery just a decade after the book was published; the whaling fleet was allegedly destroyed in the American Civil War.) As a man cursed with bad sea legs, however, the life at sea itself was not readily recognizable, but thrilling in its vivid descriptions. (I actually saw a sperm whale once, on a whale tour. I was completely drugged out on anti-nausea medicine. I wept at the sight of the majestic creature.)

While Melville challenges the racism of the time by making the whaling ship’s crew diverse, and the “savages” multi-faceted characters, the book conspicuously contains only one female character that I can recall (an owner of an inn). Not very surprising that the 2011 TV miniseries adaptation (which I haven’t yet seen, but which features an impressive cast!) gave the mentioned character of Captain Ahab’s wife screen time.

The novel is surprisingly modernist, and authors like Thomas Pynchon, one of my all-time favorites, must surely have been inspired by it. (Speaking of inspiration, it's interesting that this passage predates Walt Whitman's poem by 14 years: "Oh, my captain, my captain! [...] O master, my master, come back!") Apart from the plotting chapters, which are chronological, most chapters can almost be read out of order and stand on their own. And apart from the regular narrative prose and the aforementioned encyclopedic passages, there are other experimental chapters. One in particular stands out, as it reads like a play (perhaps Shakespearean). There are many haunting soliloquies. The bulk of the book is narrated in first person by the protagonist Ishmael, but a few chapters have other viewpoint characters, and yet others are told by an omniscient third person.

Ishmael himself is a self-proclaimed cetologist and geologist, and probably many other professions (historian, perhaps), and Moby-Dick (or more fitting, its subtitle The Whale; some editions use the subtitle The White Whale, which I think misses the point entirely) is a true treatise on whaling wrapped in a narrative which is fairly slow burning. As I read it I was actually reminded of The Wire, especially when Stubb told me that Ahab is willing to “live in the game, and die in it!”; thus I was unsurprised to learn that David Simon compared his narrative to Melville’s.

Moby-Dick has often been called the most quintessential American novel. As the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal puts it: "Violent man has a confusing revenge fantasy against a cheap source of oil."

I cannot recommend Frank Muller’s narration enough. An interesting alternate audiobook is the Moby Dick Big Read, with different readers for each chapter, including fantastic narrators such as Stephen Fry, Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Attenborough, and funnily enough, David Cameron.

If you would rather read it yourself, you have numerous options (as the book is long out of copyright). This "clickbait article" made me laugh: The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World. Power Moby-Dick is a good annotated version that can help you through some of the harder parts. It’s worth it.

Andrew John Kinney

I first read Moby-Dick as part of a college English course, and it is true that being guided by a professor through this book is a great advantage in appreciating it's beauty. Melville's use of symbolism is not always obvious, and the course I took uncovered interesting symbols that Melville skillfully built into the text; my professor also explained Melville's personal history, as a sailor and as a man. Later, I read other works by Melville, and in Billy Budd in particular, Melville worked in the Pagan symbolism of the Celtic god Bud-dugre, also known as Budd. In any of Melville's books there is a lot going on at many levels, but almost none of it is obvious, nor did he mean it to be. Melville said to Hawthorne about Moby-Dick, "I have written a very wicked book". As we now know, Melville was almost certainly bisexual, in light of which Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg makes more sense than it did to me when I first read the book, but one can also read the bedfellows scene with the humor which Melville also intended. Speaking of which there is plenty of humor in Moby-Dick, from the argument between the Quaker owners over Ishmael's "lay", to the cook preaching to the sharks, to the various exploits of Flask and Stubb. In a more dramatic vein, the sermon about Jonah by Father Mapple is a highlight of the book, in my opinion.

Others have noted the strange "digression" chapters in the book, like Cetology, etc. My professor said to skip them and keep to the main narrative, and that was good advice for a first read, although I did read them later. It is hard for us in the 21st Century to understand how authors in the 19th Century wrote for their audiences; before the internet, before TV, before movies, there were only books for entertainment, so readers wanted their books long, and digressions were welcome because they added to the length of the narrative. Remember that the main contemporaneous criticism of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, arguably the greatest eulogy ever written, was that it was too short by an hour or so. 

The story of Ahab gripped me from the start; perhaps because I knew a man like him, but his steely determination is strangely attractive, at least to me, as when Starbuck tries to "swerve him" from his crazy pursuit of the White Whale:

“Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!”

Or his outburst "Who's over me? By god, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!" Poor Starbuck, the good man, borne along, tethered to the obsessed Ahab: as a reader you sympathize with him more than any other character because his goodness is clear:

"At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not though high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured: 

"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye! - Tell me not of thy tiered-teethed sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe."'

Such writing! The many beautiful passages, heartrending passages, timeless passages in this book are worth the work to find them. At last, Ahab really is the "grand, ungodly, godlike man" as the stranger describes him in the beginning, and if this isn't great literature, I'm not sure what is.

Sometimes you read a book and realize it's only popular because a pretentious fuck from 100 years ago said everyone should read it before they die and everyone (but especially English teachers) took that literally

Normal Human

Moby-Dick (Penguin Classics)

Michael Springer

A SEMEN IS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A PSYCHO CAPTAIN, AHAB. THE CAPTAIN IS WANTING TO KILL A WHALE TO GET REFENGE, JUST LIKE THE LIFE AQUATIC. THEY SAIL AND TALK ABOUT WHALES FOREVER, AND THEN FINALLY FAIL THEIR MISSIONG. WTF?

Prashanth Srivatsa

Too encyclopediac, filled with nautical jargons and tiresome explanations of what whale fishery is all about. An anti - Old man and the sea, in that your sympathy lies with the creature rather than the hunter. Ahab's thirst for revenge is fascinating though, brimming with passion for his quest and empathy for his colorful crew, and by the end of this epic tale, you can't help but smell the salt in your room.

This Norton Critical Edition includes:* Melville's classic novel of whaling and revenge, based on Hershel Parker's revision of the 1967 text edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.* Twenty-six illustrations, including maps, contemporary engravings, and diagrams of whaleboat rigging.* Background and source materials centering on whaling and whalecraft, Melville's international reception, the inspirations for Moby-Dick, and Melville's related correspondence.* Forty-four reviews and interpretations of the novel spanning three centuries.* A revised and updated Selected Bibliography.About the SeriesRead by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format--annotated text, contexts, and criticism--helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

O livro traz o relato de um marinheiro letrado, Ishmael, sobre a última viagem de um navio baleeiro de Nantucket, o Pequod, que parte da costa leste dos Estados Unidos rumo ao Pacífico Sul, onde encontra o imenso cachalote branco que, no passado, arrancara a perna do vingativo capitão Ahab. Ao longo de 135 capítulos, Herman Melville explora diversos gêneros literários para compor sua história, da narrativa de viagens ao teatro shakespeareano, do sermão à poesia popular, passando pela descrição científica e a meditação filosófica.

Nelson Zagalo

Escrito num tempo em que a estética dominante, o romantismo, procurava elevar o maneirismo da forma escrita e enaltecer a profundidade da emoção humana, a sua leitura não poderia deixar de ser laboriosa assim como ambígua. Contudo a aventura por que somos levados a atravessar do Atlântico ao Pacífico, é de tal forma grandiosa, instigadora do instinto humano, que todo o esforço que nos é pedido é por sua vez sobejamente recompensado.

[imagens]

Se tudo isto era já suficiente para conferir grande sumptuosidade à obra, Melville não se ficaria por aqui, tendo optado por criar toda uma estrutura narrativa de imensa complexidade, por via da diversidade de géneros discursivos, elegendo dois como dominantes, o relato científico e a prosa poética. Direi que esta dualidade me causou algum espanto, não esperava encontrar num livro de 1850 tal abordagem, diria mesmo completamente fora da sua época, já que a tentativa de fazer passar um discurso factual por via do poder de envolvimento do discurso ficcional é algo que só recentemente foi entendido como potencialmente benéfico.

Em certa medida esta dualidade foi a grande responsável pelo total falhanço da obra enquanto Melville viveu, e durante mais 50 anos após a sua morte. A crítica convergiria para um ataque a esta dualidade, acusando Melville de ambição desmedida, e de não ter conseguido realizar o que se tinha proposto.


“[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition.” Henry F. Chorley, in London Athenaeum, October 25 1851


Só mais tarde, já em pleno modernismo, será “Moby Dick” redescoberto e analisado a uma luz distinta. A leitura que vai saltitando entre os dois registos, nem sempre é fácil, por isso não admira a admiração dos modernistas. É verdade que a componente científica presente em Moby Dick tem hoje quase nenhuma relevância, além de histórica, e por isso mesmo torna-se por vezes além de entediante, frustrante. Contudo, a sua leitura na época teria um valor completamente distinto, tendo em conta toda a relevância sócio-económico da caça às baleias.

Com isto não quero dizer que ler “Moby Dick” hoje perdeu todo o seu interesse. É verdade que a obra de Melville não é um tratado científico com um lastro que possa ombrear com “A Origem das Espécies” (1859) de Darwin, não por lhe faltar observação e minúcia do foro baleeiro, mas antes porque se limita a descrever, deixando toda a componente crítica para o lado ficcional da narrativa, a operar sobre o humano. Ou seja, temos uma obra em si mesma colossal, por todo o trabalho de investigação necessário ao seu desenvolvimento, a quantidade de detalhe e os modos de conseguir a informação impressionam, ao que se junta um registo poético que não terá sido ditado com menor minúcia, fruto de grande revisão e aperfeiçoamento.

Faulkner, profundo modernista, perceberia isto muito bem, a distinção de registos discursivos e a tentativa de mescla operada por Melville, e por isso quando lhe perguntaram que livro gostaria ele de ter escrito, em 1929, ele respondeu: “o livro que eu gostaria de ter escrito é ‘Moby Dick’”.

Do lado da aventura, temos uma história sobre a persistência e resiliência humanas, sobre o confronto entre o humano e o meio, a luta por levar o seu desígnio avante, por não se deixar quedar nunca, tudo e todos enfrentando para conseguir afirmar-se, nem que isso custe a sua própria vida. Neste sentido existem imensos paralelos com a obra de Hemingway, “O Velho e o Mar”, mas Melville vai mais longe, pondo os princípios do humanismo de lado para se focar completamente no domínio da espécie humana.

Para terminar, quero deixar um apontamento sobre as traduções para português. Desta vez optei pela edição brasileira da Cosac Naify, que lançou em 2008 uma tradução realizada por uma académica que se tem dedicado ao estudo da obra de Melville, Irene Hirsch, suportada na componente náutica por Alexandre Barbosa de Souza. Se optei por esta edição não foi por a Cosac a ter rotulado de definitiva, mas antes por ter realizado um trabalho comparativo com mais duas outras edições nacionais (Público e Relógio D'Água), confrontado-as com o original, e ter concluído, que se queria ler em português, esta era a única tradução que me permitia estar próximo de Melville.

A tradução lançada na colecção Geração do Público parece uma amálgama de palavras, com o texto de Melville a perder toda a musicalidade original, que achei desde logo estranha dado ter lido previamente sobre o tom poético de "Moby Dick". Mas a minha estranheza aconteceu quando embati numa frase, logo no primeiro parágrafo, que me pareceu totalmente fora de contexto, nem queria acreditar que o autor a pudesse ter escrito. Por isso peguei na edição da Relógio d'Água, que diga-se não passa de uma revisão de uma tradução antiga da Editorial Estúdios Cor, mas na qual notei logo um trabalho linguístico bastante distinto, mas a tal a frase, o substantivo, permanecia, tal e qual. Por isso fui ler o original, e nem quis acreditar que Melville, tal como eu pressentia, não tinha escrito aquilo. Deixo a frase à vossa consideração,


“(..) nessa altura, dou-me conta que está na hora de me fazer ao mar, quanto antes. É o meu estratagema para evitar o suicídio.”
Lúcia do Carmo Cabrita Harris, Colecção Geração Público, 2004

“(..) percebo então que chegou a altura de voltar para o mar, tão cedo quanto possível. É uma forma de fugir ao suicídio.”
Alfredo Margarido e Daniel Gonçalves, E.E. Cor / Relógio d’Água, 1962 / 2005

“(..) então percebo que é hora de ir o mais rápido possível para o mar. Esse é o meu substituto para a arma e para as balas.”
Irene Hirsch e Alexandre Barbosa de Souza, Cosac Naify, 2008

”(..) then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
Original de Herman Melville, 1851


Ler com formatação, imagens e links em: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Moby Dick; or, the White Whale

Dave Perkins

Absolute slog to get through. First few chapters are absolute poetry 🤌🏻

Katie Chua

I did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and i think it probably deserves a re-read. and the middle was such a slog. but the ending was great. and it is like v culturally important, it just is.

Max & Luna

I knew the story of Moby Dick, and more recently In the Heart of the Sea, but this book was def not what I expected. The actual storyline was very intriguing but interwoven in that are all of these chapters on whaling history, anatomy and so on. I found them very interesting but also somewhat distracting. I’d kind of prefer them as appendices. On the other hand, they do follow with the happenings of the book. Either way though, they are a great wealth of knowledge and I liked them being in the book.

Aside from structure, is the actual storyline. Good ole Captain Ahab! Like I mentioned, I already knew his fate….but seeing his mental descent and final moments firsthand were pretty shocking. Also the fate of the Pequod. Oh dear, this story was so very full of lessons. I wrote down a full list of them, #1 being Captain Ahab’s obsession for revenge.

As for the characters, they were all flawless. My favorites were Ishmael, Captain Ahab and Starbuck. Ishmael was so even keeled and his thoughts and ideas made for a fascinating narrative. Captain Ahab seemed to be a man on the edge, dealing with life-long disappointments and grappling at his final chance to do something important. Starbuck was a great character because he was sensible and tried to keep Ahab in line even as he was spiraling. Every other character was superb too though!

Overall this was a great book & I’m glad Moby Dick got away…I’d probably not like it as much if he hadn’t. It’s a long book but I def recommend it.

Michelle Guo

Learned a lot about whales. And the human psyche. 

Anthony Sabourin

The crazy thing about Moby-Dick is that the metaphor of hunting Moby-Dick applies to the act of reading Moby-Dick. Like, reading Moby-Dick was my Moby-Dick. And this book is fucking wild, son. This is some pre-post-modern shit, monomaniacal in its comprehensive and sturctureless pursuit of its own enthusiasms. But it's also compelling and entertaining too, like there's a part near the end where Moby Dick breaches the water and you are like hoooooly shit, and then Ahab says some cold shit to it and you are like woooooow and you force your significant other to listen to you read this book out loud to them in the kitchen as they try to make food. Anyway, let's circle back here. I've pursued Moby-Dick to the bitter end and unlike Ahab, I was successful in my pursuit. But like what do I do with my life now? Moby-Dick has your boy fucked up.

beyaz balina

Irem

Günümüzde Herman Melville’in en bilinen ve kıymet verilen kitabı olmasına karşın, kendi zamanında bir bakıma yazarlığının sonunu getiren kitap Moby Dick. Kendisi de gençliğinin uzun zamanlarını denizde tayfa olarak geçirdiği için hikayenin anlatımı da akıcılığı da çok etkileyici ve detaylı. Ancak bazı bölümlerde araya giren ve başka yazarların bilimsel kitaplarından alınan, balinalara dair detaylı biyolojik bilgiler okumayı kesintiye uğratıyor. Bu bölümler benim zaman zaman sıkılmama ve kitaba ara vermeme sebep oldular. Son olarak incil hakkında bir miktar bilginiz olması kitabı sizin için daha keyifli hale getirebilir. Çünkü oldukça fazla gönderme bulunuyor. Okumadan ölmeyin diyemeyeceğim bir kitap, okuduğuma pişman olmasam da “ya ne güzel bir kitaptı” da diyemedim bittiğinde.

Moby-Dick

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