Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback – Deckle Edge, October 27, 2009

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is one of the greatest American contributions to world literature. Although it is often labeled as a novel, and indeed it does begin as one, the book is sui generis, and contains multiple digressions in the plot that make Moby Dick a thoroughly distinct work. Notorious for its difficulty, and infamous for its many chapter's describing the mechanics and history of whaling, Melville's book is now regarded as a classic par excellence.What are we to make of this book? It is one of the strangest that I've ever encountered, and I reckon myself pretty well versed in strange books. For one, this is the most overt effort to write a 'classic' that I've come across. Melville knows what he's going for, and he self-conciously pulls out every trick in his bag. The book is firmly grounded in the Western canon, making references to Shakespeare, Locke, Milton, Kant, Plato, the Bible, Goethe, and Coleridge, among others. It is also meticulously researched, with virtually whole bibliographies on whaling and whale-stories contained within. It seems that Melville's White Whale was greatness, and he pursued it with a madman's ire, lashing out at it with every harpoon in his armory. In fact, Moby Dick was not well-received during his lifetime, and so perhaps Melville even shared in Ahab's fate.In the book, Ishmael uses everything on board the ship to serve as a metaphor for something else, until, in the end, the ship is as riddled with metaphors as with the rigs, ropes, and lines that cross her hull. Meaning is ever-elusive, and one thing can stand for ten others. The best example of this is, obviously, Moby Dick, who can take on almost infinite meanings. Is he nature, punishing the whalers for their slaughter of his kinsmen? Is he Melville's struggle with greatness? With God? Or is Moby Dick simply Fate? Or, is Moby Dick a pre-Freudian psychological device? The object of Ahab's displaced fears, hopes, and anger? Is Moby Dick a phallic symbol (his name is straightforward enough)? A ram-shaped whale, filled with white spermaceti! I hate to be coarse, but the work asks these questions, and a thousand more.Melville also gives us a consummate tragic character, Captain Ahab, who seems to be a composite of nearly every other tragic figure that came before: Achilles, Orestes, King Lear, Hamlet, Faust, and Satan from Paradise Lost. Added to that, Melville blends with Ishmael several times during the narrative, becoming both part of the story as well as the author. He makes no attempt to hide the process of creation, giving Moby Dick a strickingly modernist feel at times.But is Moby Dick a perfect work? Not a soul would argue that. Some chapters on whaling are indeed excessive, Melville's prose, while often brilliant, has a tendency to become labyrinthine and over-precise during his technical explanations. The storyline itself is actually quite short, and is told in the first and last 10% of the book, the middle 80% consisting of a monumentously ambitious literary experiment (some of which he could have spared us). But I regard these flaws as I do the scar that runs the length of Ahab's body: the flaw that makes perfection. The entire work itself becomes some sort of allegory for Ahab's character: monomaniacal, brilliant, flawed, and over-extended. Blast you, Melville, you're a genius after all.

Having reached the mid-life point, I didn't "get around to" reading MOBY-DICK until just recently. I'm certainly glad that I finally stopped putting it off. Herman Melville's work is truly one of the most amazing books I have read. As others have pointed out here, it's not always an easy read, but it is well worth devoting time to. Indeed, I approached it as if it were an artisan cheese or a fine glass of wine; I ingested it slowly, savoring it over a period of months.MOBY-DICK is told (mostly) through the eyes of a seaman ("Call me Ishmael"), beginning with his journey to Nantucket to find a job on a whaler and then continuing with his voyage on the Pequod. The initial chapters (minus the introductory matter) are somewhat misleading in that they employ a traditional narrative structure--quite amusingly describing Ishmael's first encounter with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg--and the unaware reader who enjoys this initial rollicking ride may be disappointed with the "digressions" that follow.Once the Pequod sets sail, the narrative adopts the rhythm of a voyage, i.e., long days at sea, labor-intensive with respect to the upkeep of the vessel, but otherwise dull, interspersed with heart-stopping whaling and welcome encounters with other ships. This pattern of life at sea is reflected in the book's structure in this way: the long, uneventful days lend time to the narrator to present the history, science, and art of whales and whaling, while the whaling and ship encounters brings the narration back to a more-or-less (and often less) traditional narrative structure.The core story is well known, and would be familiar even to those who haven't much other knowledge of the work. (Anyone who's seen or read JAWS would recognize the story.) A psychologically scarred and physically mutilated man, Ahab, the captain of the Pequod, is obsessed with exacting retribution against the highly dangerous white whale that made him a cripple, not to mention killing many other men. His loyal first mate, Starbuck, tries to reason with him, but Ahab is unable to respond to reason; Ahab feels that he is acting out a preordained role.MOBY-DICK, which was first published in 1851, is a surprisingly modern work. Melville explores the story using multiple perspectives and various literary devices, most notably inserting chapters written as scenes in a play. An example of this can be observed beginning with Chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck": This is a seminal chapter in that in it Captain Ahab explains the Pequod's true mission--to kill Moby-Dick--and his personal motivation for doing it: "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby-Dick that dismasted me..." Chapters 37-40, which are given sequential temporal titles ("Sunset," "Dusk," "First Night Watch," "Midnight") provide reflections on Ahab's speech to the crew from the perspective of three of the main characters, Ahab, Starbuck and Stubb; these are followed by a chapter written like a script of a musical play and which involves a number of crewmen. There is, in short, considerable exploration of and experimentation in narrative forms.What I found particularly moving were the small, almost painterly touches in Melville's writing, such as the image of a hawk in the far distance dropping Ahab's hat into the sea (Chapter 130, "The Hat"). Also delighting the reader are the intensely cinematic moments, e.g., Starbuck, standing outside Ahab's door and full of angst, ponders murderous thoughts while handling a musket (Chapter 123 "The Musket"). MOBY-DICK is a fabulous piece of art and is veritable literature worthwhile reading.

If you really have a passion for the world of Wales and the life of wailing, you will enjoy this book. I had to use ChatGPT to understand many portions due to its old English usage, but from the symbolic point of view and the philosophical point of view, it was beautifully written

This year, I want to attempt to read some of the old classic material. This was the first of this year, and I'm finally glad I read it. The flow of the story was enjoyable, and I loved the old English conversations between the crew and the writing style. There were times I needed to re-read areas , as we are not used to that style of speech today.Definitely a classic must read. Now, to choose my next classic. I don't know where to begin. I've read Jules V, HP Lovecraft, Shelly's Frankenstein, Poe, and HG wells.AnyI'm open to suggestions?

I ordered and received this book in hard cover format, and while binding quality was good, the features and print quality left much to be desired. The font size was very small. There was no first line indent on paragraphs, and no additional space between paragraphs. This made every page quite full and more difficult to read. Also, there are instances where a single line, or even a chapter heading, will occur at the bottom of one page (no widow orphan control). Overall, it's as if someone took raw text and with no professional publishing edits, just sent it to print and bound it. Oddly, there was no indication of the publisher, the copyright date, etc. There was an ISBN, which suggest it could be Omni Publishing, but given all these shortcomings, I don't know whether that is accurate.