Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Having reached the mid-life point, I didn't "get around to" reading MOBY-DICK until just recently. I'm certainly glad that I finally stopped putting it off. Herman Melville's work is truly one of the most amazing books I have read. As others have pointed out here, it's not always an easy read, but it is well worth devoting time to. Indeed, I approached it as if it were an artisan cheese or a fine glass of wine; I ingested it slowly, savoring it over a period of months. MOBY-DICK is told (mostly) through the eyes of a seaman ("Call me Ishmael"), beginning with his journey to Nantucket to find a job on a whaler and then continuing with his voyage on the Pequod. The initial chapters (minus the introductory matter) are somewhat misleading in that they employ a traditional narrative structure--quite amusingly describing Ishmael's first encounter with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg--and the unaware reader who enjoys this initial rollicking ride may be disappointed with the "digressions" that follow. Once the Pequod sets sail, the narrative adopts the rhythm of a voyage, i.e., long days at sea, labor-intensive with respect to the upkeep of the vessel, but otherwise dull, interspersed with heart-stopping whaling and welcome encounters with other ships. This pattern of life at sea is reflected in the book's structure in this way: the long, uneventful days lend time to the narrator to present the history, science, and art of whales and whaling, while the whaling and ship encounters brings the narration back to a more-or-less (and often less) traditional narrative structure. The core story is well known, and would be familiar even to those who haven't much other knowledge of the work. (Anyone who's seen or read JAWS would recognize the story.) A psychologically scarred and physically mutilated man, Ahab, the captain of the Pequod, is obsessed with exacting retribution against the highly dangerous white whale that made him a cripple, not to mention killing many other men. His loyal first mate, Starbuck, tries to reason with him, but Ahab is unable to respond to reason; Ahab feels that he is acting out a preordained role. MOBY-DICK, which was first published in 1851, is a surprisingly modern work. Melville explores the story using multiple perspectives and various literary devices, most notably inserting chapters written as scenes in a play. An example of this can be observed beginning with Chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck": This is a seminal chapter in that in it Captain Ahab explains the Pequod's true mission--to kill Moby-Dick--and his personal motivation for doing it: "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby-Dick that dismasted me..." Chapters 37-40, which are given sequential temporal titles ("Sunset," "Dusk," "First Night Watch," "Midnight") provide reflections on Ahab's speech to the crew from the perspective of three of the main characters, Ahab, Starbuck and Stubb; these are followed by a chapter written like a script of a musical play and which involves a number of crewmen. There is, in short, considerable exploration of and experimentation in narrative forms. What I found particularly moving were the small, almost painterly touches in Melville's writing, such as the image of a hawk in the far distance dropping Ahab's hat into the sea (Chapter 130, "The Hat"). Also delighting the reader are the intensely cinematic moments, e.g., Starbuck, standing outside Ahab's door and full of angst, ponders murderous thoughts while handling a musket (Chapter 123 "The Musket"). MOBY-DICK is a fabulous piece of art and is veritable literature worthwhile reading.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is one of the greatest American contributions to world literature. Although it is often labeled as a novel, and indeed it does begin as one, the book is sui generis, and contains multiple digressions in the plot that make Moby Dick a thoroughly distinct work. Notorious for its difficulty, and infamous for its many chapter's describing the mechanics and history of whaling, Melville's book is now regarded as a classic par excellence. What are we to make of this book? It is one of the strangest that I've ever encountered, and I reckon myself pretty well versed in strange books. For one, this is the most overt effort to write a 'classic' that I've come across. Melville knows what he's going for, and he self-conciously pulls out every trick in his bag. The book is firmly grounded in the Western canon, making references to Shakespeare, Locke, Milton, Kant, Plato, the Bible, Goethe, and Coleridge, among others. It is also meticulously researched, with virtually whole bibliographies on whaling and whale-stories contained within. It seems that Melville's White Whale was greatness, and he pursued it with a madman's ire, lashing out at it with every harpoon in his armory. In fact, Moby Dick was not well-received during his lifetime, and so perhaps Melville even shared in Ahab's fate. In the book, Ishmael uses everything on board the ship to serve as a metaphor for something else, until, in the end, the ship is as riddled with metaphors as with the rigs, ropes, and lines that cross her hull. Meaning is ever-elusive, and one thing can stand for ten others. The best example of this is, obviously, Moby Dick, who can take on almost infinite meanings. Is he nature, punishing the whalers for their slaughter of his kinsmen? Is he Melville's struggle with greatness? With God? Or is Moby Dick simply Fate? Or, is Moby Dick a pre-Freudian psychological device? The object of Ahab's displaced fears, hopes, and anger? Is Moby Dick a phallic symbol (his name is straightforward enough)? A ram-shaped whale, filled with white spermaceti! I hate to be coarse, but the work asks these questions, and a thousand more. Melville also gives us a consummate tragic character, Captain Ahab, who seems to be a composite of nearly every other tragic figure that came before: Achilles, Orestes, King Lear, Hamlet, Faust, and Satan from Paradise Lost. Added to that, Melville blends with Ishmael several times during the narrative, becoming both part of the story as well as the author. He makes no attempt to hide the process of creation, giving Moby Dick a strickingly modernist feel at times. But is Moby Dick a perfect work? Not a soul would argue that. Some chapters on whaling are indeed excessive, Melville's prose, while often brilliant, has a tendency to become labyrinthine and over-precise during his technical explanations. The storyline itself is actually quite short, and is told in the first and last 10% of the book, the middle 80% consisting of a monumentously ambitious literary experiment (some of which he could have spared us). But I regard these flaws as I do the scar that runs the length of Ahab's body: the flaw that makes perfection. The entire work itself becomes some sort of allegory for Ahab's character: monomaniacal, brilliant, flawed, and over-extended. Blast you, Melville, you're a genius after all.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, accompanied by King Lear by W. Shakespeare and the Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, was a monthly reading for a book club. Obviously, Moby Dick was the centerpiece of the dining, with its sheer volume compared to the others, and a myriad of topics it unraveled. Chapter 96, the Try-Works was one of the most intense chapters. While describing oil-extraction operation from sperm, Ismael observed that "Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body", which reminded me the "Seven Steps Verse or Quatrain of Seven Steps 七步詩 allegedly ciphered by 曹植, Cao Zhi, i.e., "People burn the beanstalk to boil beans, / The beans in the pot cry out. / We are born of the selfsame root, / Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?" Ismael also ascertained that "the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53), ..., and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL.", which followed "But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me... Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of DEATH, came over me." Alas, Ahab should have heeded that. Shakespearean influences can be found everywhere in the book. As can be noted, the Parsee's self-fulfilling prophecies sounded like those weird ones by the witches in Macbeth. Another interesting part of the book was Chapter 54, The Town-Ho's Story, which seemed to be the most absorbing chapter. As a story within a story; or another layer of stories under such stories, probably this chapter may have many twists, tricks, and/or plots for this specific story. That is, I doubted that such an arguably good one happened to become the head of a mutiny, I held that he was meant to be the one who led such mutiny, a rebellious one in his nature. How about the bad guy who happened to trigger the feud led to the mutiny? He probably was a bad one, but it would be absurd to move the whole burden of such mutiny to an insolent one, not onto the desperado. When I told one of my senior friends during mountain tracking last month that I was reading the Moby Dick, he suggested that the book should be read as a good business novel. He observed that the characters could be better understood if we put the characters and situations in the book into a corporate setting or business context. Indeed the book itself is about crews in whaling business - risky, profitable, and overly-exploited -, hence business perspectives underlying in the story. How about the intense politics by and between Ahab and Starbuck? Ahab seemed to be worried about the possibility of a mutiny led by Starbuck should he had gone too far. In Chapter 109, Ahab showed his unexpected self-restraint when he was confronted with Starbuck about how to deal with leaking barrels. At the end of the day, he was just an executive hired by principal owners, i.e. Captain Bildad and Captain Peleg, of the ship. How about Captain Ahab's elite whaling troupe, led by the Parsee? We have seen secret elite groups or standing task forces within large corporations. Even their phone numbers are not listed on the company directory, those groups do jobs directly mandated by the highest executives behind the scene. Having gained confidence after a series of tugs-of-war with Starbuck and his crews, or just out of nervous impatience, Ahab went all out, with Pip as his sidekick. As Ahab seized initiatives, Starbuck yielded to Ahab's authority. Chapter 132 was the most hilarious one: As Ahab exhibited a kind of "When I was young" tirade, or "Latte is Horse..", a pun in Korean, Starbuck just came down to give Ahab flattery: "Oh, my captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!" Although he knew what would come to him and his crew, he just followed his Fate, not stood against her, which is common in failling corporations.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RKRU9A/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_img Saying that Moby Dick is about whales is like saying the Old Testament is about keeping kosher. Whales are a very tiny amount of a complex whole. First, it is about obsession. We think first of Ahab's obsession about killing the whale, but careful study of the book shows that there are many obsessions present. Contained within the obsession is that kind of hubris which challenges gods to do their worst. Second, it is about piety and impiety, about religious belief and sacrilegious beliefs--beliefs plural, because there are idolaters aboard the ship. But most important, it is about human beings. Everybody is distinguishable from everybody else, unlike many novels in which it is virtually impossible to tell who has what relationship with whom. It is realism of the American, Andrew Jackson, line, not of the European line. Deconstructionists say that there is at least a hint of homosexuality in the book. They may be right; certainly Queequeg's calling Ishmael his wife is such a suggestion, even though there is no evidence that even Queequeg, much less Ishmael, ever acted upon such a suggestion. However, temporary homosexual activity even among normally heterosexual men is known to be, if not common, certainly not unheard of in any situation in which a group of males are isolated together, without access of any kind to women. A whaling ship, which might not touch land for two or three years, certainly was such an environment. I cringe when I hear it described as an adventure novel. It is not one, and the abridged editions which remove all of Ishmael's comments which seem extraneous to the book should be burned and replaced with unabridged editions. Those "irrelevancies" are part of the heart and core of the book. My husband, when at UCLA, was told by friends that Moby Dick was an extremely difficult book, so he decided, for the only time in his life, to buy Cliff Notes. Halfway through the Cliff Notes he decided that Moby Dick was the best novel ever written in any language. He threw away the Cliff Notes and settled down with the book. At the beginning, before the celebrated line "Call me Ishmael," there is a long series of quotations about whales, none of which are really about whales. He is of the opinion that you could remove whales from the book and still have a good novel, but you could not remove Ahab. Hollywood has made at least two movies about Moby Dick. Both are good movies, but it is clear that the screenwriters did not grok the book. I recommend this novel not to children, not to undergrads, not even to graduate students unless they are willing and able to take the time to study Moby Dick, using their own contexts as well as the context in which the author was working, to attempt to get a whole on some of the meanings of the text. This assumes that the reader understands that in so complex a novel, and there are few novels more complex, there is not one right meaning. There are multiple meanings which interweave themselves inextricably, while other meanings seem to grow up not from context or subtext but from intertextuality, particularly intertextuality with the Bible and specifically the Old Testament. This is not an easy novel. But it is one worth reading by a reader willing to put in the work necessary to comprehend it in part, realizing that comprehending it in toto is impossible for anyone.

the link to the audio book didn't work at all, and the linked site seems unavailable, i keep getting a google message that there is an error. so not sure what is up with that. but the ability to search the table of contents, to be able to find and read any chapter in the book whenever you want, is very good. it works. i had bought another "cheap" edition of m.d. when i first got my kindle, but not being able to access individual chapters made me dump it and search for another version. plus i love the cover, dim and gray as it is on kindle. the artist is a fantastic classic american illustrator/artist whose early 20th century artwork for m.d. fits the story. these are considered the classic, best illustrations of m.d., and they are awesome. not sure where any of them are in the text, found one tiny one, a third of a page, but i assume there's more of them included here. may have to seek out the hardcopy of this edition, to better appreciate the illustrations. hurry up with the color kindle! i always go back and read a little of this book now and then, i alway have to have it with me.....it's such a beautifully written book, it's like each page is sheer poetry. it's the best written book ever, i think. only wish h.m. could know this. this book was a failure during his lifetime, and in his life, he was pretty desperate for some good news. he was such an astounding writer. when i originally read this book, it was a slog to get thru, no doubt. it wanders here and there, lots of (unasked for) pauses in the action for super boring details about other whale hunts and other things we can just google today. but this classic story hasn't aged and never will- it's a historical novel, based on a real event, and the story involves learning all about the customs, thoughts, actions, and highly un-p.c. goings on of the period. very, very interesting. we can't do anything about how they felt or acted back then, it's history, and it is good to know how these things went, horrible and cringeworthy as they are. the characters, especially the captain, well, they are superbly written, and very real, having the emotions and reactions of flesh and blood people. sometimes people get obsessed about things- that's the captain, he's really obsessed, but he does have some reason to be pretty mad at the whale. he IS kinda selfish about his obsession, screwing up the lives of his whole crew (and the life of his wife) for a personal vendetta of his own, but in that sense, he's a pretty modern dude. there's still people around like this, you read about them in the news everyday. today they have different "crews" but still the same in alot of ways.......the story of "moby dick" is incredibly interesting, if you've never read it. and if you are looking for great literature, this is it. some things are called "classics" for a reason.

It's a strange thing to sit down, midway into my fifth decade, and actually read Moby Dick for the first time. And it's an even stranger thing to be writing a review of the book as a result. Isn't this the realm of high school or college? Why? For whatever reason, the white whale has swum into my life of late, and, upon reflection that I had never read beyond the famous opening line, I resolved to fix the situation. With many volumes to choose from, I picked the Vintage Classic on the strength of the beautiful woodcut cover, the sight of which arouses a very different feel from that of the various movies and such from which we mostly acquaint ourselves these days with the doings of Ahab and company, and the fact that it wasn't a free edition (perhaps signifying quality). Come to find out, some bits (the sermon) are missing. Still... Where do I begin? The weakness of this novel is that it plays the "role" of "Ishmael's treatise on whales" to the absolute hilt. If it is sometimes a difficult slog, with spiritual flights or incredible, if archaic, whale details beyond the point of endurance, it also gives an incredible view into the characters, minds, mores, attitudes, and realities of mid-19th Century American whaling---and more. Yes, there are homoerotic themes. Yes, there is racial bigotry. Yes, there is the justification of whale hunting. But at the same time, strangely, this is a very modern novel. We see, if the participants don't, that race matters very little. We are actually given a quite astute assessment of how the whole whaling industry will shortly founder upon the extinction of its overhunted prey. And we get the lost world of sailing in wind-powered ships to hunt huge animals at sea in tiny boats. And Ahab and his whale. Moby Dick doesn't appear until the last 8% of the novel. And Ahab is mostly this remote figure, "speaking" each vessel that the Pequod sees invariably with a query "Have you seen the white whale?". And yet the whole of the novel is this single, well-known, but somehow still captivating and enervating story of obsession. This is, rightfully, an American classic, indeed, a classic. If you have not read it, I say: it's worthwhile. Perhaps get a more complete version. But still... this is by far my most highlighted of all Kindle books (49 such). And I'm hard pressed to put one quote here. Nonetheless, this seems appropriate: -- To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. -- A mighty theme indeed.

THE NOVEL Everybody knows the story, so you might think there is no reason to actually read the novel. I just finally read it, and here are some things you don't know if you haven't read it. First, you don't know how funny it is! The first twenty chapters/100 pages, before Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, is mainly a comedy, and there is humor laced throughout the rest of the book. Second, it is full of poetic passages. Melville was heavily influenced by the style of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Third, Melville celebrates democracy, working men, and multi-cultural diversity. Yes, it is full of the mechanics of whaling, which was a deterrent to me when I first tried to read it in the Fall of 1976, but there is so much more! THE EDITION There are countless different editions of Moby-Dick as the copyright long since expired, and many are found here at one listing, making selection difficult. The one I read is one I recommend as a reading copy: the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition , which is 625 pages of text with a quite readable typeface. I'm sure the paperback binding could be cracked, which I hate, but I managed to hold it open easily and avoided cracking. WHALES AND WHALING Melville was overoptimistic about the ability of whales to survive despite whaling. Moby Dick, of course, wins in the end, but as for non-fictional whales it is a different story. Many species were in serious trouble before the IWC (International Whaling Commission) finally announced a moratorium on whaling in 1982, which is still in effect. Japan left the IWC and resumed whaling in 2019. Norway engages in limited whaling. Native Alaskans continue to hunt, though obviously the numbers are small. But with those exceptions, whaling is no more, and so whales, though still at risk from human activity, are no longer being ruthlessly hunted to extinction, and will hopefully survive the climate change now underway.

You learn about different whales and the people who hunted them. The one thing I didn't like about this book it said illustrated which means there should have been pictures but there was only one of Ahab.