Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

About this book

Moby-Dick is Herman Melville’s sixth book and the one on which his reputation rests. Melville had himself sailed on a whaling ship out of New Bedford in 1841, and his earlier novels drew on his years at sea. This one went further: it combines a story of a doomed voyage with long chapters on the anatomy of whales, the practice of whaling, and the meaning of whiteness, among many other subjects. The result is part adventure novel, part encyclopedia, and part philosophical meditation.

The book was not a success in Melville’s lifetime. It sold poorly, reviews were divided, and Melville’s career as a novelist faded within a few years. Its standing changed in the 1920s, when critics in the United States and Britain rediscovered it, and it has since come to be treated as a central work of American literature. Readers who come to it now inherit both the reputation and the book’s resistance to easy reading.

The story

The narrator, who asks to be called Ishmael, is a young man with no money and a restless disposition who decides to go to sea on a whaling ship. In New Bedford he shares a bed at a crowded inn with Queequeg, a harpooner from a South Pacific island, and the two become friends. They sign on with the Pequod, a ship out of Nantucket, whose captain, Ahab, does not appear on deck until the ship is well out to sea.

Ahab has lost a leg to a white sperm whale known as Moby Dick, and he announces to the crew that the purpose of the voyage is to hunt that whale down. The ship works its way across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Pacific, meeting other vessels and taking ordinary whales along the way, while Ahab’s single purpose draws everyone toward a final encounter.

Themes and historical context

Melville wrote the book in 1850 and 1851, during a period of close friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom it is dedicated. American whaling was then at its height, and Nantucket and New Bedford were centers of a global industry supplying oil for lamps and machinery. The novel’s chapters on whaling practice are accurate for their period and were drawn from Melville’s own experience and from published sources.

The central concern is Ahab’s obsession and what it costs. Melville sets Ahab’s will against the indifference of the natural world and asks whether the whale means anything at all or whether Ahab has projected meaning onto it. Ishmael’s voice, by contrast, is curious, humorous, and open, and the book’s digressions are his way of trying to understand something too large to grasp. The crew, drawn from many nations and races, has often been read as a picture of American society in miniature.

The novel’s first British edition was printed without the epilogue, which led some reviewers to complain that the narrator could not have survived to tell the tale. That accident contributed to the book’s poor reception in Britain.

Who should read it

Moby-Dick is long, around 210,000 words in 135 chapters, and it does not move in a straight line. Readers who expect a steady adventure plot often give up in the middle, where chapters on cetology and ship’s business alternate with the story. It helps to know this going in and to treat the digressions as part of the book rather than an interruption. The prose ranges from plain narration to passages written almost as stage drama or sermon. It rewards readers who enjoy ambitious, strange books and who are willing to slow down.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #2701 was prepared by Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger. It is the full American text including the epilogue.