Moby Dick

by Herman Melville

eBook

English language

Published April 22, 2022 by Standard Ebooks.

(23 reviews)

“Call me Ishmael” says Moby Dick’s protagonist, and with this famous first line launches one of the acclaimed great American novels. Part adventure story, part quest for vengeance, part biological textbook and part whaling manual, Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The story follows Ishmael as he abandons his humdrum life on shore for an adventure on the waves. Finding the whaler Pequod at harbour in Nantucket, he signs up for a three year term without meeting the Captain of the ship, a mysterious figure called Ahab. It is only well into the voyage that Ahab’s thirst for vengeance against the eponymous white whale Moby Dick—and the consequences—become clear.

The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years travelling the world in the early 1840s. Herman used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopaedic quality at times. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that’s being painted.

Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.

109 editions

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Deeply flawed but also a true classic

3 stars

I read this over the course of about 6 months as a group read. 5-10 of us would meet for an hour a week and take turns reading chapters. It's a very enjoyable experience that way, and at the same time I don't think I'd even have finished the book if I'd tried to read it alone.

Apart from being notoriously long, it's full of meandering digressions many of which would probably have lost me. And the tone of the writing is dominated by the pomposity of the narrator, which at times is used for great effect but at others just grates. It's also extremely wordily heavy. I realise that some of this is just the literary English of the time, but Melville was well capable of using that style to dramatic effect, like in Bartleby which I found a total page-turner, or some of my favourite individual chapters of …

So why still a classic? Well, it does manage to conjure up a world, in which it tells a story that's simultaneously very small (one boat hunting one whale) and huge (an epic journey for that crew; a microcosm of whaling as a whole), with some very vividly rendered characters along the way, and much more comedy than I expected from the way people talk about this book.

Slippy reviewed Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Review of 'Moby-Dick' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

There were parts of this that were so much better than I was expecting it to be (based on reading and hating two chapters in high school), and then parts where my eyes just glazed over and I skimmed chapters at a time.

Since I can't give some chapters 5s and some 1s, I'm averaging it out at a solid 3.