Moby-Dick: The Timeless Sea Adventure & Literary Classic (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

This novel is an epic - part story, part character study, part a discourse on whales and whaling circa the 1840s, part philosophy and in the end sheer tragedy. It's a big book physically (the paper back from Oxford Press with small print runs more than 500 pages) and a huge book intellectually It tends to overcome the reader with its rush of power, drama, character, conflict, doom and death. There's no humor in it. It's dead serous. - with a power and meaning which may feel more familiar to readers with Yankee genealogy and a cultural heritage of Congregational theology than those without. . You be the judge.It's not easy reading. One doesn't rush through this book or scan it; and when the long story finally ends and you put the book down and realize then that only Ishmael was left to tell the story of Captain Ahab and the White Whale you are left thinking Just what does it all mean?. Or does it mean anything in particular? Was it just a story told by a great writer as a story and nothing else?My answer to this will be threefold. The book is mostly story. It does have a moral in Father Mapple's sermon (more about this later) and every reader is able to find some allegory, some secondary meaning according to his mindset.So far as story goes one can pretty well summarize it by saying it's the story told by a merchant sailor named Ishmael who signs on for a whaling voyage in the early middle decades of the nineteenth century. His ship, the Pequod, 85 feet long and 228 tons, sails from Nantucket one frigid December morning, bound for the South Seas and hoping to return after two years when a hold full of whale oil.. He skipper is just "Captain Ahab" - never a last name. On her last voyage Ahab's right leg had been taken off by a huge white whale called Moby Dick and Ahab is seeking revenge on the beast. The Pequod has a crew of about thirty, her mates - Starbuck, Stubb and Trask being Nantucketers or Cape Codders, three harpooners - Queequeeg, Fedallah and Tashtego - plus a cook, cabin boy and carpenter and enough crew to fill out the required four to five oarsmen for each of her three boats. Ahab, more interested in vengeance on the white whale than the voyage itself, enlists the crew in his mission and after almost two years of indifferent success at whaling in the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean the waters off the Philippines they finally sight Moby Dick in the mid Pacific off Japan. But after a three-day chase described in some of the best-sustained prose I have ever read it is Ahab who is killed not the whale. Moby Dick turns on his pursuers, destroys their boats, kills their occupants and them rams and sinks the Pequod leaving Ishmael as the only survivor, alone in the water clinging to a floating coffin.There is so much more the story - depending on how you read it - that I scarcely know here to begin. There is allegory - the quest for vengeance. - and metaphor - just what does the white whale represent? There are characters -Queequeg, the tattooed Polynesian harpooner. Starbuck - first mate, the voice of sanity and professionalism. Stubb - second mate, strong but dumb. Perth - the carpenter, about whom Melville says some very kind things. Fedallah - the Asian, Ahab's harpooner who predicts Ahab's fate. And there are too many more to be mentioned here. You need to meet them.Then there is the writing - Shakespearian, elegant, beautiful, celestial, effusive - with a flow of words the likes of which I have not read before except in Shakespeare or in parts of the Bible. But there are long words; and there are long, convoluted sentences, some a paragraph in length. More than once in the middle of a long sentence I lost track of what Melville was trying to say and had to stop and go back to see where the sentence began and where it might end. Melville is the antithesis of Hemingway. When he can use a polysyllabic word he does. Some of it is more than a bit stilted to the modern ear not only because the Nantucketers were Quakers and used the Quakerisms of "thy" and "thou" plus others but also because Melville's idiom was simply old fashioned - one of elegant and formal nineteenth century speech with uses of "fain", "durst" and other archaic words and phrases which more than once sent me to the dictionary for the precise meaning of what he was trying to say.Melville doesn't tell a coherent story in the modern sense. Sometimes he writes in scenes with his characters on stage speaking lines. Other times he has his characters speak long soliloquies. He doesn't waste much time in description. He's more for mood and for drama. Occasionally he gets so carried away he writes nonsense. For example there's a passage (which I can't relocate as his is written) where Ahab is talking about the White Whale being a "mask" behind which something exists. But I never understood what that "something" was supposed to be. (Guess that was why it was "masked". Right?) Then there's another bit of nonsense where Melville goes on about "whiteness" and is arguing that the whiteness of the whale betokens evil. Be that as it may, it takes a lot of selling to convince the ordinary reader that the color white is anything other than the color of goodness charity and purity.Whatever one might say about him as an author he's a master of drama and of mood and of the overpowering sense of doom with which this novel begins with the most famous opening line of secular literature - "Call me Ishmael" - and then continues on to describe the cold, the winter dark, the bleak watery New Bedford waterfront where Ishmael is seeking a berth and then meets Queequeg the tattooed Polynesian harpooner who worships a shrunken head and who is the opposite of Ishmael in things civilized but of the same mind in the hunt for the White Whale. Melville continues the spell as Ishmael and Queequeg prepare to leave New Bedford to find a ship in Nantucket, just 25 miles off shore, but then suddenly shines a light in the text in three chapters (Chapters 7, 8 and 9) where Ishmael attends a service in the Whale man's Chapel. Just before leaving for Nantucket.Described here in these chapters is a chapel devoted to whales and the men who hunt them, with a pulpit - extending over and into the congregation like the prow of a ship - and Father Mapple, a retired whale man himself, who climbs into the pulpit on a rope ladder hung over the side and then, after pulling the ladder up behind him and isolated in the pulpit, delivers a sermon on Jonah and the whale. And in these three chapters Melville spells out his theme of obedience to God's commands, a belief in God that stands in contrast against the rest of the book which deals with evil and with a man (Ahab) who has taken it upon himself to act as God and who loses his life as the result. In these chapters Melville is being sincere, not telling a story; and, while the metaphor is powerful ,they deserve to be read carefully because they are central to the book.Here in the chapel Ishmael has observed the many plates on the walls memorializing those who lost their lives whaling and he contemplates Life and Death. Yes, he says, there is danger in whaling but what "what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.... My body is but the lees of my better being In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me." He then looks at the pulpit and observes that to a man of God it is a "self containing stronghold...with a perennial supply of (spiritual) water within the walls." And then after a lovely Father Mapple climbs into the pulpit and delivers one of the most eloquent sermons I have ever read - about Jonah and the whale - in the story of which he finds that Jonah's repentance for his sins causes God to forgive him and send him up again from the belly of the whale -metamorphically a delivery from evil and deathI quote from the sermon because it is worth keeping in mind as Ahab, besotted with hate, sails onward to his doom."But what is this lesson that the Book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates...it a lesson to us all as sinful men...because it is a story of the sin... repentance, prayers and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah, As with all sinners among men this sin was in his (Jonah's) willful disobedience of that command of God. - Which he found a hard command, but all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do - remember that -...and if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it's in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists."(There is much more to the sermon than I have quoted here - and it is worth reading if for no other reason than to compare the truth of what is said to the tragic events of the next 450 pages.)From New Bedford Ishmael and Queequeg sail to Nantucket where, after some spirited scenes with the ships two eccentric Quaker owners, they sign on the Pequod which sails on Christmas day on her fateful voyage, the story of which is told in the remaining 400 pages of the book which I urge you to read. They are simply too long and contain too many scenes, comments and asides on whaling to try to condense here.While much of the book is story, a part larger than I would like is devoted to Melville telling us about whales and whaling circa 1821-51. You might want to skip this because whaling has changed so much that what Melville described is now irrelevant except for historical purposes.. All the glory of the whale hunt is gone. (If you aren't interested in whales and whaling as Melville tells it you can skip Chapters 24-25, 32-35, , 60, 65-80, 82-90.and 94-98, which will shorten the read for you by about 150 pages. But you may miss Melville's decription of how a whale was "rendered" - i.e. how the whale - often almost as large as the ship - was carved up and the oil taken out after capture)Back to the question I raised on the first page of this write-up. Is this just a story? Or did Melville have something in mind when he wrote it - some greater allegorical purpose?. My answer to this question is that every reader will probably have and is entitled to his own opinion. There is no scholarly or popular agreement. It depends on how every reader reads the book; and by way of example take the jeweler who cuts a diamond. Everyone who looks at the finished piece sees it as a lovely jewel but everyone who looks at it may see different lights, different angles to it. So it is with this story. Everyone may view it as the masterpiece it is.I would argue that if Melville meant to communicate some certain lesson, some definite moral, he could have done it more clearly. There are plenty of examples in literature when this has been done - think fables (The Fox and The Grapes); think parables (The Good Samaritan, The Beatitudes); or think novels (Uncle Tom's Cabin, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle) - but Melville didn't do it. He left this jewel for us to see in it what we will. And for me it was just the distinction between the oral lesson of Father Mapple - typically hard New England Congregational theology - and the madness of a man who defied it.

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.

This book will teach you all about whaling if you are interested in it, there are even illustrations. It is well made and has the look of true quality. What is most interesting about the book is that it alludes to the fact that whales are sententious equal to humans. Documentaries at You Tube discuss this fact. Apparently, they have forgiven us for this past tragedy.

A magnificent edition of a very great book.

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.

Having never read any of the classics, I landed on this book by choice. I knew little about whaling, so I was delighted while read that the author included much history and facts about commercial whaling of the time and then known biological facts about whales. I highly recommend this book but be warned it is slow to read if all you want is fast action and adventure, as the story has all this and more to the reader that wants more.

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.

“Poet, painter and philosopher” a reviewer once called Melville. His subject matter and writing style are welded together as firmly as the 12 intertwining steel rods that make up Ahab’s harpoon and the fate of Ahab and the whale itself. The epic process of trawling through until the final confrontation mirrored The Pequod’s journey to same.As the end approached and I caught whiff, through one nostril, of the white whale’s proximity in the final pages, I deliberately slowed down my reading to more fully appreciate the journey, and because by now my reading eyes had synced with Melville’s Shakespearean rhythms, swirling poetry, dry wit, and grandiloquent turn of phrase, the final chapters were more joy than reward.The wit - after the crew had hauled all the heavy oil barrels up on deck:“top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head”.and:“The (whale’s) milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.”The poetic:“In the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and softcymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.”The tormented Shakespearean soliloquizer:“what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”The philosophical:“consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life”And the haughty self-referential:“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”Never was a book’s plot more secondary to its themes. It’s man versus everything; fate, circumstance, demons, ego, expectation, classism, religion, God, nature, empathy, understanding, brotherhood, the universe.An unforgettable and hard-won experience.

El libro llegó un poquito después del día pactado, pero todo bien. El libro es una joya brutal de la literatura.

La edición es increíble, tapa dura con sobrecubierta, buena encuadernación. El precio es buenísimo sin estar de oferta. El libro en sí es increíble, pero la lectura de este clásico es exigente, pero vale la pena.He visto algún comentario que la sobrecubierta viene raspada, pero no es cierto, es el diseño original que simula el impacto de la ballena y al estar en blanco da otra impresión.

Terrific readable copy of a classic!

Great