Moby-Dick

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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.

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.

One overwhelming feature of this novel is the large sections — probably comprising over half the length of the text — that on the surface appear to be non-fictional digressions on (among other things) whales, whaling, the color white, and the "crotch" (the forked support holding the harpoon in a whale boat).

Background

The plot was inspired in part by the November 20, 1820, sinking of the whaleship Essex, a small whaler 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. Thus, it seems highly probable that Melville used Mocha Dick as the basis for his book. It's been sugested that Melville changed the name "Mocha" to "Moby", in 1846, 4 years before the novel was published, after meeting an old south seas shipmate, Richard Tobias Green. A familiar version of Green's first names was probably Dick Toby, where Melville may have got Moby-Dick.

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".

''' Ishmael is the name the narrator takes for himself; it is unclear whether or not this is his actual name. The novel starts with one of the best-known opening sentences in all of English literature: "Call me Ishmael". 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, named 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 them. Ishmael is perhaps its voice, or its self-consciousness.

Ahab

The tyrannical captain of the Pequod who is driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Moby Dick, the whale to whom he lost his leg. Ahab sees the white whale as the embodiment of his problems and believes that he is fated to kill Moby Dick.

Moby Dick

Moby Dick is a livid white sperm whale that has been attacked by multiple whaling ships, but has been able to destroy its attackers. Melville spelled the whale's name without a hyphen, but used a hyphen in the title of the book. The color white is explored in the chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale". It calls into question the meaning of the chapters on cetology. They seem on the surface to give straight facts, but more profoundly show how difficult it is to define the whale, which has multiple interpretations and meanings as Melville intended.

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 to want 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 lacks the support of the crew in his opposition to Ahab, and is unable to persuade them to turn back. Despite his misgivings, he feels himself bound by his obligations to obey the captain. Starbucks Coffee is partly named after him. http://radio.weblogs.com/0118865/stories/2004/08/03/theConciseAndCorrectExplanationOfTheStarbucksNamingMyth.html

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 allegorical 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. Furthermore, his vengeance against the whale is analogous to man's struggle against fate. 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.

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.

Selected adaptations and references

• Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea references a hunt for a dangerous ship-sinking "Moby-Dick", which turns out to be the Nautilus.
• A 1926 silent movie, The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore as a heroic Ahab with a fiancée and an evil brother, loosely based on the novel ([IMDb link]). Remade as Moby Dick in 1930 ([IMDb link]), a version in which Ahab kills the whale and returns home to the woman he loves.
• Moby Dick Rehearsed, a 1955 television "play within a play" directed by Orson Welles ([IMDb link])
• Moby Duck is a character created for Disney's line of comic books, a relative of Donald Duck and the other ducks in the Disney mythos.
• A 1956 film directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck, with screenplay by Ray Bradbury (see Moby Dick)
• Tom and Jerry meet `Dicky Moe` in a 1961 MGM cartoon of the same name.
• Kurt Vonnegut's 1962 novel Cat's Cradle makes allusions to Moby Dick in its chapter format (short in length and many in number) and in its opening line - "Call me Jonah" as opposed to Moby Dick's "Call me Ishmael".
• The 1963 novel The Bedford Incident by Mark Rascovich and subsequent film of the same name retells the story with a Soviet submarine cast as Moby Dick. The ending, in which only the reporter survives, draws directly from Melville: "It was the devious-cruising Novosibirsk, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."
• Rocky and Bullwinkle once encountered a white whale named "Maybe Dick".
• Sam Peckinpah's 1965 film Major Dundee, with Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, recycles many of the story's plotlines and characters into a Western setting ([IMDb link]).
• Hanna-Barbera Studios's 1967 cartoon Moby Dick ([IMDb link]). Moby Dick was a Lassie-like pet hero, who rescued hapless boys menaced by various Saturday morning cartoon threats: flying saucers, shark men, and so on.
• Mad magazine's obligatory movie satire "Morbid Dick" began with the line, "Call me Fishmeal!"
• The BBC radio comedy series Round The Horne has a spoof of the story, written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman entitled Moby Duck - the Ishmael character, played by Kenneth Horne, has the unlikely name of Ebenezer Kukpowder.
• "The Doomsday Machine" is a Star Trek episode written by Norman Spinrad that is loosely based on the Moby Dick story.
• "Obsession (Star Trek)" is another Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk tries to destroy a vampire-like cloud creature that attacked and killed his captain and his crew on his old ship, the Farragut. Kirk was like Ahab and the creature resembled Moby Dick. However, the story ends with the crew learning about the creature, its menace to known space and deciding that Kirk was fundamentally correct in hunting it.
• Nova, a 1968 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany, features a starship voyage with a misfit crew, and an obsessive and facially scarred captain strongly resembling Ahab.
• The Wind Whales of Ishmael, a 1971 science fiction sequel by Philip José Farmer, transports Ishmael to the far future.
• "Moby Dick" was an instrumental recording by Led Zeppelin featuring a drum solo by John Bonham.
• National Lampoon produced a poster in which Moby Dick is rendered as a gigantic condom.
• "Nantucket Sleighride" was a recording by Mountain describing a ship's crew "in search of the mighty sperm whale" and referring to "Starbuck sharpening his harpoon".
• Jaws was a 1975 film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the novel by Peter Benchley. Actor Robert Shaw played Quint, a crusty old Ahab-like sea captain who was obsessed with hunting down a white shark. In the novel version, Quint dies in much the same way as Ahab, pulled into the depths by the creature due to a snagged harpoon line.
• Bruce Sterling's 1977 novel Involution Ocean is a science fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick.
• Moby Dick, featuring Jack Aranson as Captain Ahab, was filmed in 1978 and released in November 2005 on DVD. The director was Paul Stanley (1)[[http://www.imdb/name/nm/0822570/]] and the producer John Robert (1) ([IMDb link]).
• Rick Veitch's Abraxas and the Earthman (serialized in Marvel's Epic Magazine) was practically influenced by Moby Dick.
• Berserker Blue Death, a 1985 science fiction novel by Fred Saberhagen, is basically Captain Ahab in the 25th Century, with the White Whale replaced by the Blue Berserker ship, and with the facially scarred captain's peg leg made from a captured android leg, instead of a bone from a whale.
• [[Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan]] (1982) borrows liberally from Moby-Dick. Khan and his first officer Joachim are based on Ahab and Starbuck, and many of Khan's lines involve the character's near verbatim quotes of the novel, a paperback copy of which is seen on a shelf in Khan's exile quarters at the film's beginning ([IMDb link]).
• In [[Star Trek: First Contact]] (1996) Captain Jean-Luc Picard's fight against the Borg is compared to that of Captain Ahab against Moby Dick ([IMDb link]). Ironically, the character who makes the connection (Lily Sloane) had never read the book, while Picard was very familiar with it, quoting a short passage to which Lily responds, "Huh?"
• Moby Dick! The Musical, a 1990s West End musical about a girls' boarding school production of the classic tale
• Moby Dick, a 1998 television movie starring Patrick Stewart as Ahab ([IMDb link])
• Capitaine Achab a 2004 French movie directed by Philippe Ramos, with Valérie Crunchant and Frédéric Bonpart ([IMDb link])
• In the late 1990s, performance artist Laurie Anderson produced the multimedia stage presentation Songs and Stories From Moby Dick. Several songs from this project were included on her 2001 in music CD, Life on a String.
• Rakhnam, a purple arcwhale which threatens the party at various points in the 2001 video game Skies of Arcadia, is homage to Moby-Dick (his name in the Japanese version of the game is "Mobys").
• Francis Macbeth composed a five-movement suite for wind band named 'Of Sailors and Whales' which is based on scenes from the book Moby-Dick. The bombastic suite begins with the quiet Ishmael, which builds to a heavy climax. Queequeg follows with a flitting melody and ends with bleak chords and finally a quick note at the end. The middle movement Father Mapple is supposed to be a hymn that an imaginary man sings during the voyage. This movement is actually sung by the band, and begins very wearily but has a rather strong ending. Next is Ahab and this movement readily depicts the captain. The same is true of The White Whale, the final movement of the suite and by far one of the most fearsome pieces composed for a wind band. Each movement is preceded by some text supposed to be read to give an indication of the movement.
• The german doom-metal band Ahab refers in all of their songs to the book by Melville. Their demo "The Oath" was released in 2005. On oct, 10th 2006 their debut "The Call Of The Wretched Sea will be available in America. (http://www.ahab-doom.de)

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