Novel
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851
Opening lines
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.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A penniless young man who wants to see the watery part of the world makes his way to New Bedford and then Nantucket, and signs on a whaler with a tattooed Polynesian harpooner who has become his friend. The captain appears on deck only after several days at sea: he walks on a leg cut from a sperm whale's jawbone, nails a Spanish gold ounce to the mainmast, promised to whoever first sights the white whale that maimed him, and makes the crew swear to hunt it down. The ship sails down the Atlantic, rounds the Cape of Good Hope and meets whalers who have news of it.
Context
The author, who had served on a whaler, knew of the loss of the Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820, of whose crew only eight men survived, and of the reputation of a white sperm whale in the waters off Mocha Island, off Chile. He wrote the book on a farm in the Berkshires, a neighbour of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the work is dedicated. The English edition, published in London on 18 October 1851, nearly a month before the American one, was expurgated and lacked its epilogue, so that a critic asked how the narrator could have survived to tell the story.
Who it is for
A long novel, interspersed with documentary chapters on the animal and on whaling, which can be skipped on a first reading without losing the thread of the story.
Prizes and reception
A commercial failure when it appeared, with barely more than three thousand copies sold in the author's lifetime, it was not rediscovered until the 1920s.
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