Synopsis
Ishmael, a sailor, recounts the ill-fated voyage of a whaling ship led by the fanatical Captain Ahab in search of the white whale that had crippled him. Presented in comic book format.
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: | 2001-10-01 | | Series: | Norton Critical Editions Series | | Editor: | Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker | | Edition Description: | Subsequent |
| Size | | Length: | 726 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 22.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
For this Sesquicentennial Norton Critical Edition, the Northwestern-Newberry text of Moby-Dick has been generously footnoted to include dozens of biographical discoveries, mainly from Hershel Parker's work on his two-volume biography of Melville. A section of "Whaling and Whalecraft" features prose and graphics by John B. Putnam, a sample of contemporary whaling engravings, as well as, new to this edition, an engraving of Tupai Cupa, the real-life inspiration for the character of Queequeg. Evoking Melville's fascination with the fluidity of categories like savagery and civilization, the image of Tupai Cupa fittingly introduces "Before Moby-Dick: International Controversy over Melville," a new section that documents the ferocity of religions, political, and sexual hostility toward Melville in reaction to his early books, beginning with Typee in 1846. The image of Tupai Cupa also evokes Melville's interest in the mystery of self-identity and the possibility of knowing another person's "queenly personality" (Chapter 119). That theme (focused on Melville, Ishmael, and Ahab) is pursued in "A Handful of Critical Challenges," from Walter E. Bezanson's classic centennial study through Harrison Hayford's meditation on "Loomings" and recent essays by Camille Paglia and John Wenke. In "Reviews and Letters by Melville," a letter has been redated and a wealth of new biographical material has been added to the footnotes, notably to Melville's "Hawthorne and His Mosses." "Analogues and Sources" retains classic pieces by J. N. Reynolds and Owen Chase, as well as new findings by Geoffrey Sanborn and Steven Olsen-Smith. "Reviews of Moby-Dick" emphasizes the ongoing religious hostility toward Melville and highlights new discoveries, such as the first-known Scottish review of The Whale. "Posthumous Praise and the Melville Revival: 1893-1927" collects belated, enthusiastic praise up through that of William Faulkner. "Biographical Cross-Light" is Hershel Parker's somber look at what writing Moby-Dick cost Melville and his family. From Foreword through Selected Bibliography, this Sesquicentennial Norton Critical Edition is uniquely valuable as the most up-to-date and comprehensive documentary source for study of Moby-Dick.
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)
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