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Moby-Dick

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For the Led Zeppelin song, see Moby Dick (song).

Moby-Dick — the hyphen in the title is present in the original edition — is a novel by Herman Melville. It was first published by Richard Bentley in expurgated form (in three volumes) as The Whale in London on 18 October 1851, and then in full, by Harper and Brothers, as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in New York on 14 November 1851, in a single volume. Moby-Dick's style was revolutionary for its time: descriptions in intricate, imaginative, and varied prose 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, religion, mythology, philosophy, and science. Although its initial reception was unfavorable, 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. The novel is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

File:Moby-dick.jpg
Moby-Dick book cover

Uniquely, the titles of many of the chapters listed in the table of contents differ slightly from the corresponding chapter-titles as they appear in the text.

An overwhelming feature of this novel is that huge chunks — probably over half the text — do not advance the plot at all, but rather are non-fiction digressions on (inter alia) whales, whaling, the color white, and the "crotch" (forked support holding harpoon in whale boat). This is probably one of the many reasons high school students cringe when asked to read this "whale" of a book.

Background

Moby-Dick follows the hardy crew of the Pequod, led by Captain Ahab, on a whaling expedition that takes them around the world. The expedition soon degenerates into a monomaniacal hunt for the legendary "White Whale", as Ahab seeks revenge on the animal that cost him his leg.

The plot was inspired in part by the November 20, 1820, sinking of the whaleship Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts). The ship went down 2,000 miles (3,700 km) from the western coast of South America after it was attacked by an 80-ton Sperm Whale. The story was recounted by several of the eight survivors, including first mate Owen Chase in his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Moby-Dick also undoubtedly draws on Melville's experiences as a sailor, and in particular on his voyage on the whaler Acushnet in 1841–1842. Melville left no other account of his career as a whaler, so we can only guess as to the extent to which Moby-Dick is a roman à clef (like his previous novels Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket), and how much is wholly invented. However, it is known that there was a real-life albino sperm whale, known as Mocha Dick, that lived near the island of Mocha off Chile's southern coast, several decades before Melville wrote his book. Mocha Dick, like Moby Dick in Melville's story, had escaped countless times from the attacks of whalers, whom he would often attack with premeditated ferocity, and consequently had dozens of harpoons in his back. Mocha Dick was eventually killed in the 1830s. No one knows what prompted Melville to change the name "Mocha" to "Moby", but given that Mocha Dick was an albino sperm whale, it is obvious that Melville used him as a basis for his book.

Characters

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

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Ishmael

Ishmael is the name the narrator takes for himself, it is unclear whether or not this is his actual name. "Call me Ishmael" is one of the best-known opening sentences in English language literature. A newcomer to whaling, 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.

Ishmael resembles Melville himself in many ways, as well as the narrator of Melville's White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War. All are literary, reflective types who see their shipmates as exemplars of human nature and the universe, and tell their stories with a wealth of philosophical reflection. Ishmael himself sometimes completely vanishes into Moby Dick: toward the end of the novel it can be easy to forget that it is being told by a first-person narrator and not simply an omniscient narrator. In many ways the Pequod is a ship of outcasts that manage to form a complete society among themselves. Ishmael is perhaps its voice, or its self-consciousness.

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 whalebone, and a livid white scar that runs from head to toe and looks like the mark which a bolt of lightning leaves in the bark of a tree. Contrary to what many readers believe, the scar down Ahab's side was not given to him by Moby Dick, it was actually caused by a lightning strike ("clear spirit of clear fire", see Chapter 119). 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 spelled the whale's name without a hyphen, but used a hyphen in the title of the book. The color white seems to have specific allegorical meanings.

Mates

Starbuck, the young First Mate of the Pequod, is a 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 and blasphemy to desire revenge on an animal that lacks the capacity to understand such human concepts. Starbuck advocates continuing the more mundane pursuit of whales for their oil. He is, however, too weak and ineffectual to persuade Ahab or the crew to abandon the quest. Starbucks Coffee is partly named after him; see [1].

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 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

Harpooners

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 a skilled harpooner on Starbuck's boat. His behaviour is both civilized and savage.

Tashtego is described as a "savage" -- a Native American harpooner. The personification of the hunter, he has turned from hunting land animals to hunting whales. Tashtego is the harpooner on Stubb's harpoon boat.

Daggoo is a gigantic "savage" African harpooner with a noble bearing and grace. Daggoo is the harpooner on Flask's harpoon boat.

Fedallah is the sinister leader of Ahab's secret harpoon boat crew. He is of Persian descent ("Parsee"). "[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

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 allegory mode.

Ahab's desire to pursue Moby Dick is contrasted with Starbuck's desire to run a normal commercial whaling ship. It can be seen as the clash of idealism and pragmatism.

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.

The Pequod's quest to hunt down Moby Dick itself is also widely viewed as allegorical. To Ahab, killing the whale becomes the ultimate goal in his life, and this observation can also be expanded allegorically so that the whale represents everyone's goals. The only escape from Ahab's vision is seen through the Pequod's occasional encounters with other ships, called gams. Readers could consider what exactly Ahab will do if he, in fact, succeeds in his quest: having accomplished his ultimate goal, what else is there left for him to do? Thus, the outcome of the quest is irrelevant, and actually completing the journey is not the goal - it's the "thrill of the chase" that's important. Similarly, Melville may be implying that people in general need something to reach for in life, or contrariwise that such a goal can destroy one if allowed to overtake all other concerns.

The novel is also well-known for what some view as the homoeroticism of chapters like "A Squeeze of the Hand" and for the quasi-romantic friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg (leading some satirists to label him "Queenqueg" and the like).

Ahab's pipe is widely looked upon as the riddance of happiness in Ahab's life. By throwing the pipe overboard, Ahab signifies that he no longer can enjoy simple pleasures in life; instead, he dedicates his entire life to the pursuit of his obsession, the killing of the White Whale, Moby Dick.

File:Moby Dick comics.jpg
Page from a comics adaptation.
File:Mobyd Dick radio.jpg
Cover of a radio version.

Selected adaptations and references

 
Cover of heavy metal band Mastodon's album Leviathan.
  • The American heavy metal band Mastodon released a 2004 album named Leviathan, which contained lyrics based on Moby Dick. Some song titles include "I Am Ahab" and "Seabeast".
  • In the comic book series Bone by Jeff Smith, the protagonist (named Fone Bone) is a great admirer of Moby-Dick and refers to it frequently. When he tries to read passages from the book to his friends, they immediately fall asleep. His dreams contain a great deal of Moby-Dick imagery, and when he and his companions pass through a region in which their thoughts become reality, his cousin Phoney suddenly gains a peg-leg, a facial scar and a costume like Ahab's.
  • The word Moby appears to be an invention of Melville's. It has passed into colloquial English as a rough synonym for "very large".
  • In Marvel Comics' Livewires the ultimate goal of Project Livewire is to seek out and destroy the most secret of all black ops projects, the one they refer to as "The White Whale", because they don't actually know its real codename
  • The New England Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts hosts a Moby Dick Marathon [2] reading of the novel every January 3rd to January 4th. The next Marathon (2006) will be the 10th anniversary of this event. Volunteer readers are alloted 10 minute time slots over the approximately 25 hours it takes to read this novel aloud. Among the hundreds of Moby Dick fans who flock to this event, descendants of Melville attend every year.
  • Moby Lick was a fictitious character in Mattel's action figure line known as the "Street Sharks", that later appeared in the animated series based on the toyline. While its name is an obvious pun on Melville's work, the character itself was a humanoid orca or killer whale with a huge tongue.
  • Roger Zelazny's short story "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" is inspired by Moby-Dick. It tells the story of a whaling crew on the seas of Venus, hunting a giant Icthyosaur.
  • The novel Ahab's Wife, or the Star Gazer, by Sena Jeter Naslund, is a novel about Ahab's wife, who is briefly mentioned in Moby-Dick. In the novel, the heroine meets dozens of famous people, including Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maria Mitchell, and even Henry James as a precocious 5-year-old.
  • "Captain Ahab" makes a short appearance in the 1994 animated film, The Pagemaster, as one of a long list of "cameo appearances" by many famous literary characters and novels. Captain Ahab, along with Macaulay Culkin's character is attacked by Moby-Dick while in a rowboat. (IMDb link)
  • A Japanese animated sequel to Moby-Dick, called Legend of Moby-Dick, was produced in 1997.
 
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