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Summary
Summary
Moby-Dick is at once a thrilling adventure tale, a timeless allegory, and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. At its heart is the powerful, unknowable sea - and Captain Ahab, a brooding, one-legged fanatic who has sworn vengeance on the mammoth which whale that crippled him. narrated by Ishmael, a wayfarer who joins the crew of Ahab's whaling ship, here is the story of that hair-raising voyage, and of the men who embraced hardship and nameless horrors as they dared to challenge God's most dreaded creation and death itself for a chance at immortality.
Author Notes
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)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's 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
Horn Book Review
Melville's epic novel is presented in a comic-book style. The severely condensed plot is related in mediocre prose, and the color art has a rushed, unfinished quality. However, the book, which includes background material on whales and whaling, may serve to spark interest in the subject matter or, at some point, in Melville's original work. From HORN BOOK Spring 2003, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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.
Guardian Review
There's a wonderfully grisly story by WW Jacobs, "The Monkey's Paw", in which an old couple are granted three wishes. What they want most is to see their long-lost son again. The son, however, has just been killed by a piece of heavy machinery in a ghastly factory accident. The climactic moment comes when they hear his mangled corpse sloshing horribly toward their front door, and the old man uses the last of the three wishes to send him back to the grave. I detect a curious parallel here to my own recent experience. Having devoutly hoped for many years to acquire American citizenship, now that I have it there's a sense that something monstrous attaches to the fulfilment of the wish. That monstrous thing is of course the Bush admin- istration, and becoming an American at this precise moment in history feels not exactly like a poisoned chalice, but it certainly leaves a bittersweet taste in the mouth. My sentiments towards this country, where I have lived for more than 20 years, have been like those of many immigrants: fascinated, affectionate, grateful, though somehow never easy to articulate without resort to large vague abstractions. Extensive reading in the history of the Revolutionary period, undertaken for the writing of a historical novel, gave me a largely romantic picture of the colonists' struggle: this plucky band of farmers and fishermen challenging the greatest army in the world, with the wilderness landscapes of early America as a backdrop, and the idea of Liberty shimmering at the heart of it all. I felt in addition a strong sympathy with their robust hatred of kings, but above all an admiration, verging on awe, in fact, at their intellectual audacity. The act of political imagination it took to write first the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution - the vaunting idealism of those documents, and the eminent efficacy of the republican model they created so as to establish at least the possibility of social equality, and exclude a future in which tyranny could take hold - this is truly heroic stuff. But it is hard to detect in America's current leaders the spirit of Sam Adams and Tom Paine, Jef ferson and Franklin and all the rest who risked the king's rope for the sake of a republican ideal. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia is a keeper of the flame. In a speech on the Senate floor in late March, he said he wept for his country. America is mistrusted around the world, he said, its intentions are questioned, it ignores its friends and risks undermining international order by adopting a radical doctrinaire approach to using its awesome military might. He said America's true power lay not in its ability to intimidate, but to inspire. I am one of those who have been inspired by America, but the way forward now is dark and uncertain in the extreme. The behaviour of this administration, not least its squandering of the immense goodwill and sympathy the world felt toward us in the wake of September 11, provokes intense anxiety. Many of us continue to reject the legitimacy of the Bush election victory, and indeed this is one of the dilemmas facing the large field of contenders for the Democratic nomination jockeying for position. Do you speak to the many millions of Americans who regard the Bush presidency as illegitimate, distrust his motives in foreign policy, and tremble at what another four years of his neoconservative cabal will do to civil rights, the environment, the domestic economy, the courts, the labour unions, and not least, tolerance of dissent? Or do you emphasise your hawkishness, on the assumption that nobody who isn't strong on defence can be elected president in 2004? Most of all, I think, at least at this moment, as the dust settles in Baghdad, and hostile eyes are turned toward Syria and Iran and North Korea, we tremble at the implications of the Bush foreign policy. It has its theoretical foundations in the work of Leo Strauss, an obscure professor at the University of Chicago who died in 1973, and whom James Atlas in the New York Times recently described as the political guru of many senior Bush people. Rejecting the moral relativism of the 1960s, in a book called On Tyranny, Strauss wrote that "to make the world safe for the western democracies, one must make the whole world democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations". He asserted "the natural right of the stronger" to prevail, although he did warn of the dangers of foreign occupation: "Even the lowliest men prefer being subjects to men of their own people rather than to any aliens." Whether or not the administration heeds this last caveat, their commitment to Strauss's programme of domination is borne out in the clumsy arrogance of American "diplomacy" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Reading Melville's "Billy Budd, Sailor" last week, I came across this description of the Napoleonic wars: ". . . like a flight of harpies [they] rose shrieking from the din and dust of the fallen Bastille". Substitute "twin towers" for the last word in that sentence, and you have what many of us fear is the foreign-policy agenda of this administration. Melville is on other minds too, at this fraught time. Jason Epstein, in an essay called "Leviathan" in the New York Review of Books (May 1, 2003), suggested that Moby-Dick is prophetic, even if Bush is no Ahab, and Iraq will not sink the USA as the white whale did the Pequod. It is, rather, a thirst for vengeance Epstein recognises in both Ahab and the Bush people, Ahab's zeal resembling the administration's twisted passion to "Americanise the world, as previous empires had once hoped with no less zeal to Romanise, Christianise, Islamicise, Anglicise, Napoleonise, Germanise, and communise it". Melville saw the America of his era - and symbolised it in the whale-ship Pequod - as a nation bent on self-destruction, as in fact it was, in that it would shortly tear itself apart over the question of slavery. But the Pequod stands for America in a better, higher sense too - an inspirational sense - in that men of disparate races ship out aboard her, not only Ishmael and Queequeg but Daggoo, and Tashtego, and Fedallah the Parsee - men of all colours and religions, "federated along one keel". The ship has been at sea for some time before Ahab actually appears from below decks, and it is only then that Ishmael glimpses the man who will lead the entire crew, himself excepted, to their deaths, having diverted the ship, as Epstein notes, from its proper purpose, the hunting of whales, to his own private purpose, the seeking of vengeance on the whale that "dismasted" him. In similar fashion did I - and the hundreds of others who became citizens with me - board the good ship America, with no idea what sort of a captain would eventually emerge from below, and it's this that gives my citizenship its distinctively bittersweet flavour. In vain do I assert that I have joined the America of Adams and Jefferson and Franklin and Paine, for I live in an America whose leaders espouse a Manichean vision of a world starkly divided into good folks and bad. And if it is true that the real national treasures of the United States are her documents - the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence - then the Bush people are no less vandals of our heritage than the Iraqis who, after the fall of Baghdad, looted and destroyed the ancient artifacts of Mesopotamia. I suspect that much of my ambivalence was shared by my fellow citizens-to-be at the immigration centre in Garden City, New York, that warm, clear day in late April. During the oath ceremony - which was resolutely American, in that all those presiding were jovial and informal, and seemed genuinely happy at what they were about - the official at the podium gave a short speech reminding us that henceforth we must be loyal to our new country "through thick and thin". Was it my imagination, or was he suggesting that this, now, is an extremely thin bit, but if we just hold on, and vote with our consciences, we will have thicker times in future? I certainly plan to cast my vote for regime change in Washington, and look forward enthusiastically to exercising this most valuable right of the American citizen. Will my single, solitary vote matter? It might, if Florida 2000 is anything to go by, as long, that is, as a right- wing Supreme Court does not step in and award the election to its own favoured candidate. This is an edited excerpt from the forthcoming issue of Index on Censorship, Rewriting America, to be published on July 17, price pounds 9.50. Caption: article-mcgrath12.1 Most of all, I think, at least at this moment, as the dust settles in Baghdad, and hostile eyes are turned toward Syria and Iran and North Korea, we tremble at the implications of the Bush foreign policy. It has its theoretical foundations in the work of Leo Strauss, an obscure professor at the University of Chicago who died in 1973, and whom James Atlas in the New York Times recently described as the political guru of many senior Bush people. Rejecting the moral relativism of the 1960s, in a book called On Tyranny, Strauss wrote that "to make the world safe for the western democracies, one must make the whole world democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations". He asserted "the natural right of the stronger" to prevail, although he did warn of the dangers of foreign occupation: "Even the lowliest men prefer being subjects to men of their own people rather than to any aliens." Whether or not the administration heeds this last caveat, their commitment to Strauss's programme of domination is borne out in the clumsy arrogance of American "diplomacy" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Melville is on other minds too, at this fraught time. Jason Epstein, in an essay called "Leviathan" in the New York Review of Books (May 1, 2003), suggested that Moby-Dick is prophetic, even if Bush is no Ahab, and Iraq will not sink the USA as the white whale did the Pequod. It is, rather, a thirst for vengeance Epstein recognises in both Ahab and the Bush people, Ahab's zeal resembling the administration's twisted passion to "Americanise the world, as previous empires had once hoped with no less zeal to Romanise, Christianise, Islamicise, Anglicise, Napoleonise, Germanise, and communise it". Melville saw the America of his era - and symbolised it in the whale-ship Pequod - as a nation bent on self-destruction, as in fact it was, in that it would shortly tear itself apart over the question of slavery. But the Pequod stands for America in a better, higher sense too - an inspirational sense - in that men of disparate races ship out aboard her, not only Ishmael and Queequeg but Daggoo, and Tashtego, and Fedallah the Parsee - men of all colours and religions, "federated along one keel". The ship has been at sea for some time before Ahab actually appears from below decks, and it is only then that Ishmael glimpses the man who will lead the entire crew, himself excepted, to their deaths, having diverted the ship, as Epstein notes, from its proper purpose, the hunting of whales, to his own private purpose, the seeking of vengeance on the whale that "dismasted" him. - Patrick McGrath.
Kirkus Review
Shadowy pictures of larger-than-life figures cast atmospheric gloom over this summary version of the classic.Edwards leaves out most of the gory whaling bitsas well as Ahab's talismanic doubloon and so many other details that what's left is more a precis of the main plot points. It's speckled with vague allusions ("Despite ominous warnings, Queequeg and I stayed committed to the Pequod") and capped with a one-line climax: "Claiming more than just the harpoon boats, Moby Dick dashed the Pequod and claimed all her crew. All except one." In Horsepool's stylized paintings, semiabstract views reveal icy seas in which looming clouds, icebergs, and the whale look much alike. These alternate with scenes of monumental but misshapen human figures (Queequeg and Ahab both sport tiny pointed heads atop humongous bodies) that are often seen from behind and generally in dim lighting. Ishmael appears only at the end, looking more like he's standing in knee-deep water than clinging to the coffin. The cast's diverse origins draw a narrative mention, but aside from Queequeg and one crew member in a group scene, everyone in the art appears to be white. Other recent illustrated versions outsail this superficial recasting. (Picture book. 10-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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.
