Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Plot 

Ishmael, the narrator, announces his committed to ship aboard a whaling vessel. He has made several journeys as a sailor but none as a whaler. He travels to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he stays in a whalers’ inn. Since the guesthouse is rather full, he has to share a bed with a harpooner from the South Pacific named Queequeg. At first rejected by Queequeg’s strange habits and shocking appearance (Queequeg is covered with tattoos), Ishmael eventually comes to appreciate the man’s bigheartedness and kind spirit, and the two decide to seek work on a whaling vessel together. They take a ship to Nantucket, the traditional capital of the whaling industry. There they secure berths on the Pequod, a savage-looking ship adorned with the bones and teeth of sperm whales. Peleg and Bildad, the Pequod’s Quaker owners, drive a hard bargain in terms of salary. They also mention the ship’s mysterious captain, Ahab, who is still recovering from losing his leg in an encounter with a sperm whale on his last journey.

The Pequod leaves Nantucket on a cold Christmas Day with a team made up of men from many different countries and races. Soon the ship is in warmer waters, and Ahab makes his first entrance on surface, balancing carefully on his false leg, which is made from a sperm whale’s jaw. He announces his wish to hunt and kill Moby Dick, the well-known great white whale who took his leg, because he sees this whale as the picture of evil. Ahab nails a gold doubloon (Spanish Gold coin) to the staff and declares that it will be the prize for the first man to sight the whale. As the Pequod sails toward the southern tip of Africa, whales are sighted and unsuccessfully hunted. During the hunt, a group of men, none of whom anyone on the ship’s crew has seen before on the journey, appears from the hold. The men’s leader is an exotic-looking man named Fedallah. These men constitute Ahab’s private harpoon crew, bring in aboard in disobedience of Bildad and Peleg. Ahab hopes that their skills and Fedallah’s visionary abilities will help him in his hunt for Moby Dick.

The Pequod rounds Africa and enters the Indian Ocean. A few whales are successfully caught and processed for their oil. From time to time, the ship encounters other whaling vessels. Ahab always demands information about Moby Dick from their captains. One of the ships, the Jeroboam, carries Gabriel, a crazy forecaster who forecasts destiny for anyone who threatens Moby Dick. His forecasts seem to carry some weight, as those aboard his ship who have hunted the whale have met disaster. While trying to drain the oil from the head of a captured sperm whale, Tashtego, one of the Pequod’s harpooners, falls into the whale’s huge head, which then rips free of the ship and begins to sink. Queequeg saves Tashtego by diving into the ocean and cutting into the slowly sinking head.

During another whale hunt, Pip, the Pequod’s black cabin boy, jumps from a whaleboat and is left behind in the middle of the ocean. He goes silly as the result of the experience and becomes a crazy but predictive entertainer for the ship. Soon after, the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby, whaling ship whose captain, Captain Boomer, has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick. The two captains discuss the whale; Boomer, happy simply to have survived his encounter, cannot understand Ahab’s desire for revenge. Not long after, Queequeg falls ill and has the ship’s carpenter make him a coffin in anticipation of his death. He recovers, however, and the coffin eventually becomes the Pequod’s replacement life marker.

Ahab orders a harpoon copied in the hope that he will soon encounter Moby Dick. He sprinkles the harpoon with the blood of the Pequod’s three harpooners. The Pequod kills several more whales. Issuing a prediction about Ahab’s death, Fedallah declares that Ahab will first see two hearses (a vehicle for conveying the coffin at a funeral), the second of which will be made only from American wood, and that he will be killed by rope. Ahab interprets these words to mean that he will not die at sea, where there are no hearses and no hangings. A storm hits the Pequod, revealing  it with electrical fire. Ahab takes this incidence as a sign of pending battle and success, but Starbuck, the ship’s first mate, takes it as a bad warning and considers killing Ahab to end the mad quest. After the storm ends, one of the sailors falls from the ship’s header and sinks—a ugly vision of what lies ahead.

Ahab’s eager desire to find and destroy Moby Dick continues to increase, and the mad Pip is now his endless companion. The Pequod methods the equator, where Ahab expects to find the great whale. The ship encounters two more whaling ships, the Rachel and the Delight, both of which have recently had fatal encounters with the whale. Ahab finally sights Moby Dick. The harpoon boats are launched, and Moby Dick attacks Ahab’s harpoon boat, destroying it. The next day, Moby Dick is sighted again, and the boats are dropped once more. The whale is harpooned, but Moby Dick again attacks Ahab’s boat. Fedallah, trapped in the harpoon line, is dragged overboard to his death. Starbuck must move the Pequod between Ahab and the angry whale.

On the third day, the boats are once again sent after Moby Dick, who once again attacks them. The men can see Fedallah’s dead body smashed to the whale by the harpoon line. Moby Dick hits the Pequod and sinks it. Ahab is then caught in a harpoon line and hurled out of his harpoon boat to his death. All of the remaining whaleboats and men are caught in the cyclone created by the sinking Pequod and pulled under to their deaths. Ishmael, who was thrown from a boat at the beginning of the chase, was far enough away to escape the cyclone, and he alone survives. He floats over Queequeg’s coffin, which exploded back up from the accident, until he is picked up by the Rachel, which is still searching for the crewmen lost in her earlier encounter with Moby Dick.

Characters:

    Ishmael

Despite his centrality to the story, Ishmael doesn’t reveal much about himself to the reader. We know that he has gone to sea out of some deep spiritual malaise and that shipping aboard a whaler is his version of committing suicide—he believes that men aboard a whaling ship are lost to the world. It is apparent from Ishmael’s frequent digressions on a wide range of subjects—from art, geology, and anatomy to legal codes and literature.

Additionally, Ishmael represents the fundamental contradiction between the story of Moby-Dick and its setting. Melville has created a profound and philosophically complicated tale and set it in a world of largely uneducated working-class men; Ishmael, thus, seems less a real character than an instrument of the author. No one else aboard the Pequod possesses the proper combination of intellect and experience to tell this story.

Ahab

Ahab, the Pequod’s obsessed captain, represents both an ancient and a quintessentially modern type of hero.  His wonderful overconfidence, or hubris, leads him to challenge common sense and believe that, like a god, he can pass his will and remain protected to the forces of nature. He considers Moby Dick the personification of evil in the world, and he pursues the White Whale monomaniacal because he believes it is obvious destiny to destroy this evil.

Ahab suffers from a deadly fault that is not necessarily inborn but instead stems from damage, in his case psychological and physical, inflicted by life in a harsh world. He is as much a victim as he is an attacker, and the symbolic opposition that he constructs between himself and Moby Dick pushes him toward what he considers a destined end.

      Tashtego 

    

    Stub’s harpooner, Tashtego is a Gay Head Indian from Martha’s Vineyard, one of the last of a tribe about to disappear. Tashtego performs many of the skilled tasks aboard the ship, such as beating the case of spermaceti in the whale’s head. Like Queequeg, Tashtego symbolizes certain characteristics of the “noble violent” and is meant to challenge racial stereotypes. He is, however, more practical and less intelligent than Queequeg: like many a common sailor, Tashtego desires uncommon.

    Pip 

    A young black boy who fills the role of a cabin boy or jester on the Pequod. Pip has a minimal role in the beginning of the narrative but becomes important when he goes insane after being left to drift alone in the sea for some time. Like the fools in Shakespeare’s plays, he is half idiot and half prophet, often perceiving things that others don’t.

      Fedallah

    A strange, “oriental” old Parsee (Persian fire-worshipper) whom Ahab has brought on board unbeknownst to most of the crew. Fedallah has a very striking appearance: around his head is a turban made from his own hair, and he wears a black Chinese jacket and pants. He is an almost supernaturally skilled hunter and also serves as a prophet to Ahab. Fedallah keeps his distance from the rest of the crew, who for their part view him with unease.

     Peleg

    A well-to-do retired whaleman of Nantucket and a Quaker. As one of the principal owners of the Pequod, Peleg, along with Captain Bildad, takes care of hiring the crew. When the two are negotiating wages for Ishmael and Queequeg, Peleg plays the generous one, although his salary offer is not terribly impressive.

     Bildad

    Another well-to-do Quaker ex-whaleman from Nantucket who owns a large share of the Pequod. Bildad is (or pretends to be) crustier than Peleg in negotiations over wages. Both men display a business sense and a bloodthirstiness unusual for Quakers, who are normally pacifists.

     Captain Boomer

    The jovial captain of the English whaling ship the Samuel Enderby. Boomer lost his arm in an accident involving Moby Dick. Unlike Ahab, Boomer is glad to have escaped with his life, and he sees further pursuit of the whale as madness. He is a foil for Ahab, as the two men react in different ways to a similar experience.

      Gabriel 

     A sailor aboard the Jeroboam. Part of a Shaker sect, Gabriel has prophesied that Moby Dick is the incarnation of the Shaker god and that any attempts to harm him will result in disaster. His prophecies have been borne out by the death of the Jeroboam’s mate in a whale hunt and the plague that rages aboard the ship.