Moby-Dick

Table of contents

1 Synopsis 2 Inspiration 3 Reaction 4 Characters 5 Plot 6 Symbolism 7 Selected adaptations 8 External links

Synopsis

Moby-Dick is a novel by the American writer Herman Melville. First published on November 14, 1851, Moby-Dick's style was revolutionary for its time. Descriptions of the methods of whale-hunting, the adventure, and the narrator's reflections interweave the story's themes with a huge swath of Western literature, history, mythology, philosophy, and science. The prose is intricate, imaginative, and varied. It was published in an expurgated version entitled The Whale in London one month before appearing in the United States.

Inspiration

The plot was inspired in part by the November 20, 1820 sinking of the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts). The ship went down 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America after it was attacked by an 80-ton Sperm Whale.

See also Thomas Nickerson

Reaction

In spite of being poorly received when first published, Moby-Dick is now considered to be one of the canonical novels in the English language, and has secured Melville's reputation in the first rank of American writers.

Characters

Warning: Plot details follow.

The crew-members of the Pequod, are carefully drawn stylizations of humans types and habits; critics have often described them as a "self-enclosed universe."

• Ishmael: "Call me Ishmael", is one of the best known opening sentences in English language literature. Ishmael serves as our eyes and ears aboard the Pequod. He is, at the end, the only witness alive to tell the tale. Ishmael was the name of the first son of Abraham in the Old Testament. The Biblical Ishmael was born to a slave woman because Abraham believed his wife, Sarah, to be infertile; when God granted her a son, Isaac, Ishmael and his mother were turned out of Abraham's household. The name has come to symbolize orphans and social outcasts. From the beginning, Ishmael tells us that he turns to the sea out of a sense of alienation from human society. Ishmael, like Melville, has a rich literary background that he brings to bear on his shipmates and their adventure.

• Captain Ahab: Ahab is the captain of the whaling ship Pequod. Having lost a leg to Moby Dick on their last meeting, Captain Ahab is consumed with the desire for revenge. He has a peg leg made of whale bone, and a livid white scar that runs from head to toe, that looks like the mark a bolt of lightning leaves in the bark of a tree. There are two Ahabs named in the Bible, one a King of Israel, the other a blasphemous prophet delivered by God to be killed by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. The captain is named after the king, who is described in the novel as "bloodthirsty."

• Moby Dick: Moby Dick is a livid white sperm whale who has been attacked by multiple whaling ships, but has been able to destroy his attackers. Melville spelt the whale's name without a hyphen, but used a hyphen in the title of the book.

• Starbuck: Starbuck, the young first mate of the Pequod, is thoughtful and intellectual Quaker.

"Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organization seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance... [H]is far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend[ed] to bend him ... from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward." --Moby-Dick, Ch. 26

Starbuck is alone among the crew in objecting to Ahab's quest, declaring it madness to want revenge on an animal that lacks the capacity to understand such human concepts. Starbuck's Coffee is named after him.

• Queequeg: Queequeg the harpooner is a "savage" cannibal from a fictional island in the south seas. The son of the chief of his tribe, he befriends Ishmael in Nantucket before they leave port. Queequeg is the harpooner on Starbuck's harpoon boat.

• Stubb: Stubb is the second mate of the Pequod, who always seems to have a pipe in his mouth and a smile on his face. "Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests."--Moby-Dick Ch. 27

• Flask: Flask is the third mate of the Pequod. "A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered."--Moby-Dick Ch. 27

• Tashtego: A "savage" (per the novel) Native American harpooner. The personification of the hunter, who has turned from hunting land animals to hunting whales. Tashtego is the harpooner on Stubb's harpoon boat.

• Daggoo: A gigantic "savage" (per the novel) African harpooner with a noble bearing and grace. Daggoo is the harpooner on Flask's harpoon boat.

Fedallah: Fedallah is the sinister leader of Ahab's secret harpoon boat crew. "[T]all and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head." Moby-Dick Ch.48

Plot

Warning: Plot details follow.

Moby-Dick follows the crew of the Pequod, led by Captain Ahab, a Quaker, on a whaling expedition that takes them around the world. The expedition soon degenerates into a monomaniacal hunt for the legendary "Great White Whale", as Ahab seeks revenge on the animal that cost him one of his legs and gave him a vicious scar down his torso.

Symbolism

• All of the members of the Pequod's crew have biblical-sounding, improbable or descriptive names, and the narrator deliberately avoids specifying the exact time of the events and some other similar details. These together suggest that perhaps we should understand the narrator--and not just Melville--to be deliberately casting his tale in an epic and allegorical mode.

• The white whale itself, for example, has been read as symbolically representative of good and evil, as has Ahab.

• The white whale has also been seen as a metaphor for the elements of life that are out of our control.

Selected adaptations

• A 1926 silent movie, The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore as a heroic Ahab with a fiancee and an evil brother. Remade as Moby Dick in 1930.
• A 1956 film directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck. Screenplay by Ray Bradbury
• Moby Dick, a West End musical about a school production of the classic tale.
• A 1998 television movie with Patrick Stewart as Ahab, Moby Dick.
• Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, a multimedia stage presentation by Laurie Anderson.
• "Moby Dick" is also the title of an instrumental by Led Zeppelin featuring a drum solo by John Bonham.
• "The Doomsday Machine" is a Star Trek episode written by Norman Spinrad that is loosely based on the Moby Dick story.
• Rakhnam, a purple arcwhale which threatens the party at various points in Skies of Arcadia, is an homage to Moby-Dick (his name in the Japanese version of the game is "Mobys").

External links

• Moby-Dick Gutenberg EText

• Searchable full text of Moby-Dick available here