9780679783275 | Moby-Dick or, The Whale

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

Elizabeth Hardwick is the author of many books and essays

Introduction

vii

Loomings

1

(8)

The Carpet-Bag

9

(7)

The Spouter-Inn

16

(20)

The Counterpane

36

(6)

Breakfast

42

(3)

The Street

45

(4)

The Chapel

49

(5)

The Pulpit

54

(4)

The Sermon

58

(12)

A Bosom Friend

70

(6)

Nightgown

76

(3)

Biographical

79

(5)

Wheelbarrow

84

(7)

Nantucket

91

(3)

Chowder

94

(5)

The Ship

99

(19)

The Ramadan

118

(8)

His Mark

126

(6)

The Prophet

132

(5)

All Astir

137

(4)

Going Aboard

141

(5)

Merry Christmas

146

(6)

The Lee Shore

152

(2)

The Advocate

154

(6)

Postscript

160

(2)

Knights and Squires

162

(6)

Knights and Squires

168

(7)

Ahab

175

(5)

Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb

180

(5)

The Pipe

185

(2)

Queen Mab

187

(3)

Cetology

190

(18)

The Specksynder

208

(4)

The Cabin-Table

212

(8)

The Mast-Head

220

(10)

The Quarter-Deck, Ahab and All

230

(11)

Sunset

241

(3)

Dusk

244

(2)

First Night-Watch

246

(2)

Forecastle--Midnight

248

(10)

Moby Dick

258

(14)

The Whiteness of the Whale

272

(12)

Hark!

284

(2)

The Chart

286

(7)

The Affidavit

293

(12)

Surmises

305

(5)

The Mat-Maker

310

(4)

The First Lowering

314

(15)

The Hyena

329

(3)

Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah

332

(4)

The Spirit-Spout

336

(7)

The Pequod Meets the Albatross

343

(3)

The Gam

346

(6)

The Town-Ho's Story

352

(27)

Monstrous Pictures of Whales

379

(7)

Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales

386

(6)

Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, & c.

392

(4)

Brit

396

(4)

Squid

400

(4)

The Line

404

(5)

Stubb Kills a Whale

409

(7)

The Dart

416

(3)

The Crotch

419

(2)

Stubb's Supper

421

(10)

The Whales as a Dish

431

(4)

The Shark Massacre

435

(3)

Cutting In

438

(3)

The Blanket

441

(5)

The Funeral

446

(2)

The Sphynx

448

(4)

The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam, Her Story

452

(9)

The Monkey-Rope

461

(6)

Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale

467

(8)

The Sperm Whale's Head

475

(6)

The Right Whale's Head

481

(5)

The Battering-Ram

486

(5)

The Great Heidelburgh Tun

491

(3)

Cistern and Buckets

494

(6)

The Praire

500

(4)

The Nut

504

(4)

The Pequod Meets the Virgin

508

(15)

The Honor and Glory of Whaling

523

(5)

Jonah Historically Regarded

528

(3)

Pitchpoling

531

(4)

The Fountain

535

(7)

The Tail

542

(7)

The Grand Armada

549

(17)

Schools and Schoolmasters

566

(5)

Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

571

(6)

Heads or Tails

577

(4)

The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud

581

(9)

Ambergris

590

(4)

The Castaway

594

(6)

A Squeeze of the Hand

600

(5)

The Cassock

605

(2)

The Try-Works

607

(6)

The Lamp

613

(1)

Stowing Down and Clearing Up

614

(4)

The Doubloon

618

(9)

The Pequod Meets the Samuel Enderby of London

627

(10)

The Decanter

637

(7)

A Bower in the Arsacides

644

(6)

Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton

650

(4)

The Fossil Whale

654

(5)

Does the Whale Diminish?

659

(7)

Ahab's Leg

666

(4)

The Carpenter

670

(4)

The Deck.Ahab and the Carpenter

674

(6)

The Cabin, Ahab and Starbuck

680

(4)

Queequeg in his Coffin

684

(8)

The Pacific

692

(2)

The Blacksmith

694

(4)

The Forge

698

(5)

The Gilder

703

(3)

The Pequod Meets the Bachelor

706

(4)

The Dying Whale

710

(3)

The Whale Watch

713

(2)

The Quadrant

715

(4)

The Candles

719

(9)

The Deck

728

(1)

Midnight, on the Forecastle

729

(3)

Midnight, Aloft

732

(1)

The Musket

733

(6)

The Needle

739

(5)

The Log and Line

744

(5)

The Life-Buoy

749

(5)

Ahab and the Carpenter

754

(3)

The Pequod Meets the Rachel

757

(6)

The Cabin, Ahab and Pip

763

(3)

The Hat

766

(6)

The Pequod Meets the Delight

772

(2)

The Symphony

774

(6)

The Chase--First Day

780

(14)

The Chase--Second Day

794

(12)

The Chase--Third Day

806

(19)

Epilogue

825

(2)

Notes

827

(16)

Commentary

843

(10)

Reading Group Guide

853

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Call me Ishmael. This resonant opening of Moby-Dick, the greatest novel in American literature, announces the narrator, Herman Melville, as he with a measure of slyness thought of himself. In the Scriptures Ishmael, a wild man sired by the overwhelming patriarch Abraham, was nevertheless the bastard son of a serving girl Hagar. The author himself was the offspring of two distinguished American families, the Melvilles of Boston and the Gansevoorts of Albany.

Melville's father cast something of a blight on the family escutcheon by his tendency to bankruptcy which passed down to his son. Dollars damn me, the son was to say over and over. When he sat down in the green landscape of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to compose Moby-Dick he was in debt, the father of one son, and another to be born a few days after the publication of the novel in England.

Melville had published five novels previous to Moby-Dick; the first two did well, and then with the capriciousness of the public the subsequent novels failed to please. He was a known literary figure with a fading reputation. How he came upon the courage to undertake the challenging creation of the epical battle between a sea creature, a white whale called Moby Dick, and an old captain from Nantucket by the name of Ahab is one of literature's triumphant mysteries. Add to that, as one reads, that he was only thirty-two years old.

Ten years before, in 1841, he had signed up as a common seaman on the whaling vessel Acushnet bound for the South Seas. Young Ishmael was drawn by the lure of the sea and by the wonder of the whale itself, the Leviathan, the monarch of the deep, "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air." Until the discovery of petroleum oil in 1859 and Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp in 1879, whaling was a major commercial occupation in New England. Fortunes were made, grand houses were built, often with a "widow's walk" on the roof that testified to the great dangers of the enterprise. For the crew, service on a whaler was a drastic life of unremitting labor; foul, crowded quarters; bad food in scanty servings; contractual terms for years at miserable wages; brutalized companions picked up from all the ports of the world; tyrannical captains practicing a "sultanism" which Melville abhorred. A ship afloat is after all a prison. Melville was on three whalers in his four years at sea and from each, as we read in Typee and Omoo, the struggle is to escape, as he did when the boats anchored near exotic islands. He wrote about the misery of the whaling life, but not about whaling itself until he came to Moby-Dick. His imaginary whaler, the Pequod, death bound as it is, would be called, for an ordinary seaman, an agreeable berth. Ahab has no interest left beyond his internal struggle with one whale.

Still, there is whaling, the presumption of it. When a whale is sighted small boats are detached from the main vessel and the men engage in a deadly battle to try to match, with flying harpoons, the whale's immense strength and desperation. If the great thing is captured, the deck of the main ship becomes an abattoir of blood and guts. The thick blubber is to be stripped, the huge head to be drained of its oils for soothing ambergris, for candles; the bones of the carcass make their way into corsets and umbrellas and scrimshaw trinkets. Moby-Dick is a history of cetology, an encylopedic telling of the qualities of the fin-back, the right whale, the hyena whale, the sperm whale, the killer whale, classified by size in mock academic form as folio, octavo, and so on.

Information about a vanished world is one thing, but, above all else, this astonishing book is a human tragedy of almost supernatural suspensiveness, written in a rushing flow of imaginative language, poetical intensity, metaphor and adjective of consuming beauty. It begins on the cobbled streets of New Bedford, where Ishmael is to spend a few days before boarding the Pequod in Nantucket. The opening pages have a boyish charm as he is brought to share a bed with a fellow sailor, the harpooner Queequeg, an outrageously tattoed "primitive" who will be his companion throughout the narrative. Great ships under sail gave the old ports a rich heritage of myth, gossip, exaggeration, and rhetorical flights. Ishmael, on a Sunday, visits a whaleman's chapel to hear the incomparable sermon by Father Mapple on Jonah and the whale, a majestic interlude, one of many in this torrential outburst of fictional genius.

As Ishmael and Queequeg proceed to Nantucket, the shadows of the plot begin to fall upon the pages. The recruits are interviewed by two retired sailors who will struggle to express the complicated nature of Captain Ahab. We learn that he has lost a leg, chewed off by a whale, and thus the fated voyage of the Pequod begins. Ahab has lost his leg to a white whale Moby Dick and is consumed with a passion for retribution. He will hunt the singular whale as a private destiny in the manner of ancient kings in a legendary world. However, Ahab is real and in command. The chief mate, Starbuck, understands the folly of the quest, the danger of it, and, as a thoughtful man longing to return to his wife and children, he will speak again and again the language of reason. "Vengeance on a dumb beast that simply smote thee from the blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

The necessity of Starbuck's human distance from the implacable imperative of Ahab's quest illustrates the brilliant formation of this harrowing tale. But it is Ahab's story, his destiny, and, if on the one hand, he is a shabby, sea-worn sailor long mesmerized by mercurial oceans, he too has a wife at home and a child of his old age. We learn, as the story proceeds, that on a time ashore after his terrible wounding, he had fallen and by way of his whalebone leg been unmanned. He has suffered an incapacity not to be peacefully borne by one who in forty years had spent only three on land. Ahab knows the wild unsuitability of his nature, his remove from the common life.

Excerpted from Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Moby-Dick or, The Whale

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