Moby Dick

Herman Melville

Jan 1892 · Dana Estes & Company

About this eBook

A literary classic that wasn't recognized for its merits until decades after its publication, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick tells the tale of a whaling ship and its crew, who are carried progressively further out to sea by the fiery Captain Ahab. Obsessed with killing the massive whale, which had previously bitten off Ahab's leg, the seasoned seafarer steers his ship to confront the creature, while the rest of the shipmates, including the young narrator, Ishmael, and the harpoon expert, Queequeg, must contend with their increasingly dire journey. The book invariably lands on any short list of the greatest American novels.

Ratings and reviews

Moby Dick Moby Dick is a book with a drawn out theme of revenge. Captain Ahab seeks out the whale that caused him to lose his leg. The sense of revenge seeps from nearly every page. The one ding against this book is that it gets you so riled up so much that you just want to punch a fish. This book is quite challenging and requires an amazing reading ability and the understanding of the figurative language that Melville uses. Melville goes on for pages upon pages, and sometimes it can be difficult to follow. Moby Dick is not for the faint of heart, I would recommend it exclusively to rogue scholars and anyone that enjoys Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but I would especially recommend this novel to anyone that is currently studying American history because this is one of the novels that began the idea of American literature, and it expresses intense themes of Manifest Destiny, the new frontier and more. Melville creates the open sea as the new frontier, and the whalers each represent explorers like Louis and Clark after the Louisiana Purchase. Coincidently, Moby Dick was published prior to the “closing of the western frontier.” I think it is greatly rewarding to know the mentality of the era when Melville wrote Moby Dick because then aspects of the story become clearer.

As I waded through this book I found myself generally appalled by the carnage wrought by humans on an other animal who had no degree of competition with us. Seeing those feelings of awed disillusionment aside I enjoyed the movement, albeit slow until the very end, between various rhythms of prose. The early chapters are developed as any other period novel then move into a pedantic encyclopedic stretch. Then follow mixtures of novel and play until the end wherein all things move fast to an abrupt finale that

Whatever software you use to go from printed/scanned page to PDF has a real problem with the exclamation point, at least with this book. Search in the online version for "men 1," for example and you'll find many places where the numeral 1 erroneously appears in place of an exclamation point or as the capital letter I. I found it on page 157 or so, where the original says "...men ! " but the Google version says, "men 1 " Not clear if the extra spaces are necessary, either. I suspect that errors like these are common to many other books whose original typeface was something blockier and less modern than what current books use. In fact, there are probably lots of uncorrected transcriptions. Not necessarily a huge deal, given that this is a free book, but still.

About the author

Herman Melville is a major figure in American literature, largely due to his revered nautical novel Moby-Dick. As a young New Yorker, Melville developed wanderlust and headed for the high seas. Writing about his adventures in the South Pacific led to his debut, Typee, but after this popular book, Melville's success declined. Later works, particularly Moby-Dick, weren't wholeheartedly embraced until well after Melville's death, with resounding acknowledgement not arriving until the early 20th century.