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"As a revelation of human destiny it is too deep even for sorrow," was how D.H. Lawrence characterized MOBY-DICK. Published in the same five-year span as "The Scarlet Letter," "Walden," and "Leaves of Grass," this great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul is the ultimate achievement of that stunning period in American letters.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Etymology
• Extracts
• Chapter 1 Loomings
• Chapter 2 The Carpet Bag
• Chapter 3 The Spouter-Inn
• Chapter 4 The Counterpane
• Chapter 5 Breakfast
• Chapter 6 The Street
• Chapter 7 The Chapel
• Chapter 8 The Pulpit
• Chapter 9 The Sermon
• Chapter 10 A Bosom Friend
• Chapter 11 Nightgown
• Chapter 12 Biographical
• Chapter 13 Wheelbarrow
• Chapter 14 Nantucket
• Chapter 15 Chowder
• Chapter 16 The Ship
• Chapter 17 The Ramadan
• Chapter 18 His Mark
• Chapter 19 The Prophet
• Chapter 20 All Astir
• Chapter 21 Going Abroad
• Chapter 22 Merry Christmas
• Chapter 23 The Lee SHore
• Chapter 24 The Advocate
• Chapter 25 Postscript
• Chapter 26 Knights and Squires
• Chapter 27 Knights and Squires
• Chapter 28 Ahab
• Chapter 29 Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb
• Chapter 30 The Pipe
• Chapter 31 Queen Mab
• Chapter 32 Cetology
• Chapter 33 The Specksynder
• Chapter 34 The Cabin Table
• Chapter 35 The Mast-Head
• Chapter 36 The Quarter-Deck. Ahab and all
• Chapter 37 Sunset
• Chapter 38 Dusk
• Chapter 39 First Night-Watch
• Chapter 40 Forecastle-Midnight
• Chapter 41 Moby Dick
• Chapter 42 The Whiteness of the Whale
• Chapter 43 Hark!
• Chapter 44 The Chart
• Chapter 45 The Affidavit
• Chapter 46 Surmises
• Chapter 47 The Mat-Maker
• Chapter 48 The First Lowering
• Chapter 49 The Hyena
• Chapter 50 Ahab's Boat and Crew-Fedallah
• Chapter 51 The Spirit-Spout
• Chapter 52 The Pequod meets the Albatross
• Chapter 53 The Gam
• Chapter 54 The Town Ho's Story
• Chapter 55 Monstrous Pictures of Whales
• Chapter 56 Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales
• Chapter 57 Of Whales in Paint, in teeth, &c.
• Chapter 58 Brit
• Chapter 59 Squid
• Chapter 60 The Line
• Chapter 61 Stubb kills a Whale
• Chapter 62 The Dart
• Chapter 63 The Crotch
• Chapter 64 Stubb's Supper
• Chapter 65 The Whale as a Dish
• Chapter 66 The Shark Massacre
• Chapter 67 Cutting In
• Chapter 68 The Blanket
• Chapter 69 The Funeral
• Chapter 70 The Sphynx
• Chapter 71 The Pequod meets the Jeroboam. Her Story
• Chapter 72 The Monkey-rope
• Chapter 73 Stubb & Flask kill a Right Whale
• Chapter 74 The Sperm Whale's Head
• Chapter 75 The Right Whale's Head
• Chapter 76 The Battering Ram
• Chapter 77 The Great Heidelburgh Tun
• Chapter 78 Cistern and Buckets
• Chapter 79 The Prairie
• Chapter 80 The Nut
• Chapter 81 The Pequod meets the Virgin
• Chapter 82 The Honor and Glory of Whaling
• Chapter 83 Jonah Historically Regarded
• Chapter 84 Pitchpoling
• Chapter 85 The Fountain
• Chapter 86 The Tail
• Chapter 87 The Grand Armada
• Chapter 88 Schools & Schoolmasters
• Chapter 89 Fast Fish and Loose Fish
• Chapter 90 Heads or Tails
• Chapter 91 The Pequod meets the Rose Bud
• Chapter 92 Ambergris
• Chapter 93 The Castaway
• Chapter 94 A Squeeze of the Hand
• Chapter 95 The Cassock
• Chapter 96 The Try-Works
• Chapter 97 The Lamp
• Chapter 98 Stowing Down & Clearing Up
• Chapter 99 The Doubloon
• Chapter 100 The Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London
• Chapter 101 The Decanter
• Chapter 102 A Bower in the Arsacides
• Chapter 103 Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton
• Chapter 104 The Fossil Whale
• Chapter 105 Does the Whale Diminish?
• Chapter 106 Ahab's Leg
• Chapter 107 The Carpenter
• Chapter 108 The Deck. Ahab and the Carpenter
• Chapter 109 The Cabin. Ahab and Starbuch
• Chapter 110 Queequeg in his Coffin
• Chapter 111 The Pacific
• Chapter 112 The Blacksmith
• Chapter 113 The Forge
• Chapter 114 The Gilder
• Chapter 115 The Pequod meets the Bachelor
• Chapter 116 The Dying Whale
• Chapter 117 The Whale-Watch
• Chapter 118 The Quadrant
• Chapter 119 The Candles
• Chapter 120 The Deck
• Chapter 121 Midnight, on the Forecastle
• Chapter 122 Midnight, Aloft
• Chapter 123 The Musket
• Chapter 124 The Needle
• Chapter 125 The Log and Line
• Chapter 126 The Life-Buoy
• Chapter 127 Ahab and the Carpenter
• Chapter 128 The Pequod meets the Rachel
• Chapter 129 The Cabin. Ahab and Pip
• Chapter 130 The Hat
• Chapter 131 The Pequod meets the Delight
• Chapter 132 The Symphony
• Chapter 133 The Chase. First Day
• Chapter 134 The Chase. Second Day
• Chapter 135 The Chase. Third Day
• Epilogue
• Editorial Appendix
• Historical Note
• Textual Record
• Note on the Text
• Discussions of Adopted Readings
• List of Emendations
• Report of Line-End Hyphenation
• List fo Substantive Variants
• Related Documents
• Melville's Notes (1849-51) in a Shakespeare Volume
• Melville's Notes in Chase's Narrative of the Essex
• Melville's Acshnet Crew Memorandum
• The Hubbard Copy of The Whale
• The Jones Copy of Moby-Dick and the Harper Whale Title Page

Extracto provisto por Syndetics

CHAPTER 1 LOOMINGS Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absentminded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this: "grand contested election for the presidency of the united states. "whaling voyage by one ishmael. "bloody battle in afghanistan." Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment. Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. Excerpted from Moby Dick by Bob Harvey, Herman Melville All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Library Journal Review

Moby-Dick is one of our greatest and most enduring works. The physically and psychologically scarred Ahab's at-any-cost pursuit of the white whale is a riveting tale with considerable philosophical overtones. Then there is Melville's invention of the Pequod, a microcosm of humanity together with his mythopoeic vision of both the greatness and self-destructive tendencies of America. Finally, there is the intricate narrative technique itself, with the story of Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab constantly being interrupted for minutia about the whaling industry and numerous other subjects, often with digressions within digressions. At first, Paul Boehmer seems a tad youthful and earnest to convey this momentous yarn, but, after all, this is the story of the young and inexperienced Ishmael. In addition to avoiding an overly melodramatic voice for Ahab, Boehmer offers an exceptionally well-measured performance, alternating between the calm and the enthusiastic. An excellent production; recommended for all collections.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The great white resurfaces in this gripping, comic book-style retelling. Comic-strip veterans Schwartz and Giordano condense Melville's leviathan tale into an action-packed, 48-page adventure. Despite forgoing Melville's "Call me Ishmael" first-person narrative and sensory details, this retelling closely adheres to the original plot, including some pivotal scenes absent from Allan Drummond's spare but entertaining 1997 Moby Dick. The dense story clips along, thanks to concise but appealingly hammy storytelling and melodramatic drawings, plus multiple panels that quicken the pace. When Ishmael meets Queequeg, for instance, the author squeezes out every drop of suspense: "There in the dimly lit room looms the forbidding image of Queequeg... harpoon at the ready, poised to sink its sharp head into his shaking body!!" Giordano ratchets up the tension with a series of close-ups of Ishmael's terrified face as he awakens to the "savage" in his rented room. The brooding, dark-toned panels exude imminent danger-an ideal milieu for Captain Ahab's doomed voyage. The book also provides a brief biography of Melville, as well as facts about whaling and New Bedford, Mass., the city that commissioned this retelling in celebration of the 150th anniversary (in 2001) of Moby Dick's original publication. Ages 8-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 1-4-In this picture book for older readers, Melville's first-person epic about the sea-loving Ishmael and his entanglement in Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the great white whale is stripped down to its core elements. As a consequence, little of the original's literary, thematic, and historical merit remains, and many of the book's important plot points are left out completely; that being said, this version should appeal to young readers who enjoy straightforward, narrative-driven works. Edwards does manage to successfully convert Melville's verbosity into a more accessible form for modern children while maintaining the tone and style of speech. Each spread features a single illustration that highlights the key event mentioned in the text; these are colored with dramatic effect. Character designs have a Disney-like quality; body shapes and facial features are embellished to represent personalities visually. VERDICT This title offers a decent introduction to the plot of the classic but is best used for entertainment rather than educational purposes.-Rachel Forbes, Oakville Public Library, Ont. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction.

Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged.

By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War.

His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, became Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well.

Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, along with his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.

(Bowker Author Biography)