Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13278 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Released on: 2001-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

From Library Journal
November 14 marks the 150th anniversary of Melville's salty saga of vengeance and obsession. Now a contender for the great American novel, this book was harpooned at the time of its 1851 publication by critics who found it overly long and boorish (observations no doubt still shared by countless high school students). They felt that like Ahab, the story didn't have much of a leg to stand on. The once lucrative whaling industry also was in its death throes and of little interest to readers. The book was forgotten for decades before being rediscovered in the 1920s by scholars who understood and appreciated the multilevel symbolism and allegory dismissed by their 19th-century predecessors. Melville published little after the failure of Moby-Dick and made his living as a customs inspector in New York City, where he was born in 1819 and died in complete obscurity in 1891. He is buried in the Bronx. This edition of his masterwork includes the full text along with illustrations of whales, whaling barks, and whaling instruments; maps; and a new introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick. A lot for the price.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

What other American work compares to Virgil and Shakespeare?

Forget everything you have heard or think you know about this book. What it decidedly is not is the story of a one-legged madman pursuing a whale for revenge.

Do not give this book to high-school students. Have them read THE AENEID, the prophet Isaiah, a few scenes of HAMLET, so that when they are forty and MOBY-DICK falls into their hands, they will recognize at least some of its underpinnings.

MOBY-DICK is as weird and far-ranging as Scripture, and stakes out the same terrority, namely heaven, hell, earth, mortality, joy, flesh, eternity, the soul. Ahab is no more mad than Edmund in KING LEAR: the real madman of MOBY-DICK is Melville himself. But he can only have been unhinged by an angel, so sweeping is the power of his imagination.

It's perverse to look on the shape and construction of MOBY-DICK as radical, innovative, foreshadowing such moderns as Joyce; it's like calling Revelations "innovative." Melville has no such aim and has no interest in technique. Indeed, he has few "literary" virtues. His language is dense, syntactically clumsy, exhausting, over-precise to the point there's no telling what precisely is being said. No human being could speak the dialogue that erupts from the mouths of its personages: it's like opera, or the dialogue in PARADISE LOST. It has a more urgent, essential motive than speech. It's the soul speaking.

MOBY-DICK is nothing so trivial as a literary experiment. It aims for wholeness, concreteness; it wants to be about everything, inside and out, and its eye is everywhere. Melville senses the sun and stars are part of his story, and equally so the bones and guts of a whale, so he makes them characters. When the convention of the first-person narrator becomes too restrictive, he lets Ishmael lapse, absorbing him and all of the Pequod into a single, unlocatable consciousness that seems to have existed before time.

The greatness of this book has nothing to do with its "qualities," but with its passion, its madness -- its genius. If ever a secular work was inspired, surely it was this one. It is beautiful not in the way books are, but as a created thing is, a horse or a river or a redwood. It makes little sense to me to call MOBY-DICK The Great American Novel, since it's hardly a novel at all; it is sui generis, acknowledging no standards but its own. If it must be a novel, then has the same standing in the canon of world literature as TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES: the supremest expression of the mind of a culture, disavowed by the culture itself.

As for this edition, it is at least handsomely printed and well bound. The foreward is profoundly irrelevant, and there are no notes, though I can't imagine any torrent of notes would be of much use in penetrating the mystery of this vision, prophecy, epic, call it what you will.

If you find yourself these days looking for reasons to be proud to be American, MOBY-DICK will give you one.

I May Be Biased But...
Readers say it's far too long, the cetacean history is tedious, who the heck cares how to best prep a harpoon line? Well if you're one of those folks who likes a good harpoon-prep scene, you're in for a treat. If not, you might learn something, and, failing that, the singular dexterity with which the author lays the words on the page will not only awe you but carry you into the very whale boat. You will feel in your guts the rush of the sleigh ride, you will breathe the sea air and taste the mist, you will feel the salt hardening on your hands and face. Don't like any of that? Unless there's no place you'd rather be than your rocker, this is escapism as good as it comes. And don't even get me started on timeless themes, unforgettable characters and a plot as fine as they come....

A serious book that demands a serious reader
Moby Dick belongs to the first rank of world literature. Melville read widely and deeply within the Western tradition, and brought it all together in his complex masterpiece. Within the framework of a simple tale of obsession, Melville offers commentary on the corpus of philosophy, history, theology, and literature that is our inheritance. All of these themes swirl around the central question of the novel: should we affirm the world, with all of its evil, or should we defy it?

Ahab, memorably, chooses defiance, and staking his all on that defiance, literally disappears, all flags flying, into the whirlpool. The effect is stunning.

Along the way we meet different approaches to the central question embodied in the crew of the Pequod and the various ships she encounters on her long journey. Melville offers no one answer, but rather a piercing observation of the various human reactions to the problem of evil. Nathanial Hawthorne said of Melville that his curse was that he could neither believe nor disbelieve in God. In Moby Dick, we are drawn into the fury of Melville's wrestling match with God, and whether we believe, or don't believe, surely we are enriched by Melville's passionate struggle. The strongest expression of the struggle is Ahab, the epic figure who believes, but refuses to submit to the gods or to the fates. Is he the hero of the piece or the villain? However you view him, you won't forget him.

As memorable as some of the scenes in this novel are, it is a long novel, and there are many detours. For those who are well-versed in both literature and philosophy the long stretches of commentary on whales, and whaling, and whalers, and all of that are actually commentaries on the Western canon. Not a line is wasted. The infamous chapter on Cetology is about whales, yes; but it is even more a commentary on epistemology (and a hysterically funny one, at that).

The book begins as a novel, and moves on to explore other forms of literature -- most notably dramatic tragedy and the epic. In doing so, Melville makes an overt bid to be counted as one of the great writers in the Western tradition; and I, for one, think he succeeds. The novel is a complex tapestry, in which all of the pieces, even the seemingly meaningless ones, come together into that central whirlpool that brings Moby Dick to a close. It is a work that can be read again, and again, and again.

There are great sections that are exciting and accessible to all. But for a more casual reader, there are long stretches that will seem pointless and incomprehensible.
For someone looking for something a bit more accessible, "Billy Budd" and "Bartleby the Scrivener" are two Melville works that are shorter and more plot-driven. Yet both have the same complexity of thought that is so magnificently presented in Moby Dick.

Still, if you are up to the challenge, Melville will reward you in spade