Moby Dick by Herman Melville (PDF)

Description

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fantastical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab’s passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul.Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel, and a wealth of information on whales and 19th-century whaling, Melville’s greatest work presents an imaginative and thrilling picture of life at sea, as well as a portrait of heroic determination. The author’s keen powers of observation and firsthand knowledge of shipboard life (he served aboard a whaler himself) were key ingredients in crafting a maritime story that dramatically examines the conflict between man and nature.“A valuable addition to the literature of the day,” said American journalist Horace Greeley on the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851 — a classic piece of understatement about a literary classic now considered by many as “the great American novel.” Read and pondered by generations, the novel remains an unsurpassed account of the ultimate human struggle against the indifference of nature and the awful power of fate.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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 death I 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.

⭐I felt a kind of necessity to read this book because of it being a classic and a required text for academic classes of American literature. I thought there were some exceptional scenes from the book and the brooding monologues had a kind of Shakespearean quality, which made them the best parts of the book. The extended studies of whales and whaling took some work to wade through but with the grim descriptions of how whales are processed made me think, no wonder Moby Dick was vengeful as Ahab in the three attacks on him and finally the ship. I also found interesting the parallels between Ahab and Moby Dick. The conflict was complex by both of their psychologies. Who really was the Leviathan? There was a discussion almost glossed about the whale population of that time, and it became an underlying issue and reared its head occasionally. The graphic explanations of processing the carcass, the value of the whale’s body make the book quite relevant to today. I almost want to ask where are the Moby Dicks of today fighting back. This brings up another question: Who is the hero? I’m not sure Melville was too interested in answering these questions; just raise them and that intention is more provocative and intriguing to me.

⭐This book came, in spite of its age, it is from 1977, in a super good condition, like never used,absolutely stunning!!! And what a wonderful size, 7 x 10 “…. Lovely for my book collection ofamerican classics!!! Great seller, absolutely fast an trustworthy… Regards from East Frisland, Arend

⭐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.

⭐I learned more about whaling than I ever thought I would know. The details of that business are quite amazing.

⭐He literally turns the prose into poetry making what appears difficult on the page to something beautiful and comprehensible. Highly recommended!

⭐My all-time favourite book, this is most definitely a masterpiece. Although Melville did have initial success by the end of his life his name was more or less forgotten because novels such as this one did not really sell, indeed this was already out of print before the author died, and when first published met with a bevy of very mixed reviews. Thankfully in the 1920s this was re-discovered and hailed as the masterpiece that it of course is, as well as being the ‘Great American Novel’.Its structure and plotting were ahead of its time, which was probably one reason it never did that well at its original publication, but also this holds up a mirror to us all, and to be honest no one likes to see themselves, warts and all. With one of the most famous openings in all of literature, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ it is simple and yet eloquent. Within its multiple narrative style so we hear from our narrator, but also this does give us other perspectives throughout, as it draws on many influences and other works, giving us not only an intimate portrayal of the whaling business and life on a whaling ship, but also the different types of whale, and what the whole business was set up for.Of course as we all know, what should be just a normal whaling voyage becomes something more here, as Captain Ahab is set on vengeance, wanting to locate the whale Moby-Dick, that has crippled him. Changing to a script at times, thus making some chapters more like a play so the structure and planning of this was unlike anything that went before, but it all meshes together quite seamlessly.Taking in such themes as religion, spirituality, bigotry, the pursuit of the mighty dollar, revenge, hate and love, with friendship and so on this has much to offer any reader, although as with any intelligently written book that takes in many themes and issues this does require a close and careful read to gain the full effect and power of the story. After all, if you think that this is just a novel about whaling, I am sorry to say that you have not understood what you have read. In all once read this is something that you won’t easily forget and is in all a fantastically wonderful piece of prose, showing that the novel is a form that can offer us so much.

⭐I have been meaning to read ‘Moby Dick’ since I was a teenager and although I’ve read a large amount of classic literature over the years, I’ve somehow never quite got around to Herman Melville’s novel which tells of Captain Ahab and his quest to kill the whale that removed one of his legs in a previous encounter. So when I spotted this very attractively presented Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, I decided that now was the time to read it – but was it worth the wait? Well, this is a difficult question to answer because this book is one that totally engaged me in some respects, but not in others.Firstly I very much enjoyed the beginning of the book where Ishmael meets up with the tattooed Queequeg at the Spouter Inn and of the start of their ‘bosom’ friendship; I also enjoyed reading how Ishmael and Queequeg get taken on to work as whalers on the ship ‘Pequod’ and of Ishmael’s initial meeting with the grizzled one-legged seafarer, Captain Ahab, who is intent on exacting his revenge on Moby Dick; and I enjoyed the author’s descriptions of situation and setting aboard a nineteenth century sailing ship.What I found a bit difficult was the amount of information about the whaling industry, some of which I found rather upsetting, especially where the author writes about the hunting of female whales with calves, and although some of the information was very interesting (for example: how if a male whale is attacked its fellow males will hastily make their escape, but if a female whale is attacked, other females will try to help her) there was too much that I found discomfiting. I also found there to be a little too much in the way of extraneous information and too many digressions for this story to work well for me and although I know the author had a purpose in writing in this way, I have to admit to finding parts of this book rather wearing.I am aware that this book is a great American classic and has other themes apart from those that are immediately obvious, and I did enjoy parts of the story and found the ending totally gripping – however, despite being informed that this novel improves with subsequent readings, it’s most probably not a book I would pick up again. In summary, I’m glad I finally got around to reading ‘Moby Dick’, but I’m also rather glad I’ve finished it too.3 Stars.

⭐I purchased the illustrated Moby Dick off Amazon, I brought this edition to replace my second hand-battered paperback book. This has been one of my worthwhile purchases, for some reason I thought the book would be a slender, but it turned out to be a massive beautifully illustrated edition, don’t be put off by the size it nice to have a quality book which can act as a coffee table item for guest to flip through, bedside reading companion. I’m putting my on a book shelve for a rainy day or when one is snowed in and can’t get to work. The story is epic and very well written if you into to seafaring stories it a classic, like Gone with the Wind is a romance story to end or romance stories. I can’t think of any modern epic stories possible Dune modern time epic stories tend to be done as a series of books not a one off. I like illustrated books and like them not to be flimsy I brought the illustrated special edition The Alchemist and The Restless Girls.

⭐A great novel. The introduction, notes, glossary, diagrams and maps are excellent. But the text is just awful. It appears to have come out of a malfunctioning inkjet printer – with deformed letters, spontaneous lines of semi-italics, and a great many black flecks in random places. Why? I have hardback pocket editions of literary classics (Chatto, Dent, Cape, Macmillan) produced in the 1920s and 1930s, with beautiful, legible type. How can a century of technical advances result in such inferior print quality? Neither Penguin nor the printer – Clays – should have put their names to this.I had hoped to buy some more of this range, but I won’t be doing that now. If you want a hardback (and I do) get a different edition. A wasted opportunity. Avoid.

⭐Well, ahem … where do I even start? Forget the narrative subtleties, forget the mammoth-whale chase and forget all the cetological whalelore, if not the geo-aesthetics, and we are left with the sea – the omnipotent, omnipresent and the omnicidal. But between the potency and the presence lies the chasm upon which the phantom feeds. The phantom is but a whale, haunting and haunted; and Moby-Dick is neither about a whale nor about the chase. It is about the monstrosity of the sea that undulates within the interstices of the hull – the tremor of which is never seen but only felt in the prosthesis of the spine. It is about the intensities and the multi-variegated interface of the oblique waves that refracts too less of geometry then rejects all that we managed to grasp. Too much of spermaceti but too little is the light to illumine the abyss of the thalassic mind.O Reader, do you think it’s about a monomaniac vengeance? Well then, offend I must the humanists, for the topological multiplicity of the oceanic offers a yawning analysis of that grinning jawbone chased by a prosthetic-legged man, for when they meet each other, a shudder of the flukes sends splinters into the heart that holds the harpoon – a paroxysm of grief and all that we have lost in the singular spasm of the sea. It is not about vengeance but about the viperous obliquity of the splash that carries enough venom to deafen the mad. The splash is present in the arcs of the spine and the phantom-whale is but a figment of the splash upon that ancient spine and to hunt it is the inception of Vikriti upon the Virat and all the grandeur in catastrophic harmony gathers into a vortex upon which hovers a single “black bubble”, where the disreality of non-utterance concentrates and atomizes perpetually. We are but forced to lunge into it only to emerge out again into an event of disbelief where our hammers freeze and all tongues collapse but the red flag that was yet to be nailed into the mainmast-head ripples quite gently upon the haphazard shivers of the ocean – an ocean become all froth and foam from the tear-stricken eyes of sailors exiled within the wrecks under the eddies.We, the Shakespearean Protozoa, drunk with a literary overdose of lysergic acid, turn to face the jaw of the whale within which our Monadic ancestors lie. But even before we are lowered into our boats, we but see fractals folding and frowning at us from the forehead of the whale beyond which our visions collapse. The spout sprays butane and all we see is vapour. Moby-Dick is gas and in search of Thalassa, all of us are Ahabs behind slouched hats, foolishly branded with the stigma of monomania, when we are trying to discover Marina, like lost-Ulysseses become hollow-Prufrocks, exhausted in our drifting-oceanic voyage, all of us seeking a way to evaporate before the spermaceti lanterns extinguish.Surreal.P.S: Apologies, I do not know how to write, for when an Ahab is dragged into the depths and a Pip lost forever and with neither any Starbucks who cherish nor any Stubbs who cheer, all a stupid reader like me can do is float under the black bubble of constant sorrow where I see myself burst.I apologise to the world for the foolishness I am.

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