Synopsis
Misunderstood and unappreciated in its time, Melville's monumental work has become the classic epic of American literature. He tells the dual story of the initiation of young Ishmael, a schoolteacher, into the life of a seaman, and the tragedy of Captain Ahab's obsession with the white whale. The novel begins with a lengthy dissection of the word WHALE and its origins, and includes numerous citations about whales and the hunting of them, all taken from the extensive notes Melville accumulated during his research at the New York Public Library, and which he could not bear to leave out. After this rather pedantic beginning, the story proper begins. Another exploration of Melville's perennial themes of good vs. evil and the fundamental isolation of the human condition, MOBY-DICK is a layered, complex, allusive book that is part rip-roaring adventure tale, part quest, part travel chronicle, part picaresque coming-of-age novel. At the end of the wrenching narrative, Ishmael sets himself the task of telling the tale that would make Melville's reputation as one of the greatest American writers.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1990-06-01 | | Series: | Great Illustrated Classics |
| Size | | Height: | 7.8 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 11.2 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Responsive to the shaping forces of his age as only men of passionate imagination are, even Melville can hardly have been fully aware of how symbolical an American hero he had fashioned in Ahab....He is the embodiment of his author's most profound response to the problem of the free individual will in extremis."
F. O. Matthiessen
"It is all wonderful except the rhetoric....Also it is a lot of words about a whale. But in it there is something wonderful."
letter to Lillian Ross - Ernest Hemingway
"[MOBY DICK] is one of the most moving myths ever imagined on man's fight against evil and on the irresistible logic which ends up by pitting the just man first against creation and the creator and later against his equals and against himself."
Camus
"This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed....The result is, at all events, a most provoking book...."
Henry F. Chorley (10/25/1851)
"High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in [MOBY-DICK]."
London Morning Advertiser (10/24/1851)
"Of all the extraordinary books from the pen of Herman Melville this is out and out the most extraordinary. Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber.Yet few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedition....It is not a mere tale of adventures, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds."
London John Bull (10/25/1851)
"We part with the adventurous philosophical Ishmael, truly thankful that the whale did not get his head, for which we are indebted for this wildly imaginative and truly thrilling story. We think it the best production which has yet come from that seething brain, and in spite of its lawless flights, which put all regular criticism at defiance, it gives us a higher opinion of the author's originality and power than even the favorite and fragrant first-fruits of his genius, the never-to-be-forgotten TYPEE."<BR>--Horace Greeley, in New York Tribune, November 22 1851
New York Tribune (1841-1924) - Horace Greeley (11/22/1851)
| See an error? Submit a change request |
All rights reserved.
