Moby Dick: Or, The Whale

Front Cover
The Floating Press, Jan 1, 2009 - Fiction - 1077 pages
The itinerant sailor Ishmael begins a voyage on the whaling ship Pequod whose captain, Ahab, wishes to exact revenge upon the whale Moby-Dick, who destroyed his last ship and took his leg. As they search for the savage white whale, Ishmael questions all aspects of life. The story is woven in complex, lyrical language and uses many theatrical forms, such as stage direction and soliloquy. It is considered the exemplar of American Romanticism, and one of the greatest American novels of all time.
 

Contents

Chapter 70
589
Chapter 71
594
Chapter 72
605
Chapter 73
613
Chapter 74
624
Chapter 75
632
Chapter 76
638
Chapter 77
642

Chapter 8
96
Chapter 9
101
Chapter 10
116
Chapter 11
123
Chapter 12
127
Chapter 13
132
Chapter 14
140
Chapter 15
144
Chapter 16
150
Chapter 17
176
Chapter 18
187
Chapter 19
195
Chapter 20
202
Chapter 21
207
Chapter 22
214
Chapter 23
222
Chapter 24
225
Chapter 25
234
Chapter 26
236
Chapter 27
242
Chapter 28
250
Chapter 29
257
Chapter 30
263
Chapter 31
265
Chapter 32
269
Chapter 33
292
Chapter 34
297
Chapter 35
307
Chapter 36
318
Chapter 37
332
Chapter 38
335
Chapter 39
337
Chapter 40
339
Chapter 41
349
Chapter 42
366
Chapter 43
381
Chapter 44
384
Chapter 45
393
Chapter 46
408
Chapter 47
413
Chapter 48
418
Chapter 49
437
Chapter 50
441
Chapter 51
446
Chapter 52
453
Chapter 53
457
Chapter 54
465
Chapter 55
502
Chapter 56
511
Chapter 57
517
Chapter 58
522
Chapter 59
527
Chapter 60
532
Chapter 61
539
Chapter 62
548
Chapter 63
551
Chapter 64
554
Chapter 65
568
Chapter 66
573
Chapter 67
576
Chapter 68
580
Chapter 69
586
Chapter 78
646
Chapter 79
654
Chapter 80
659
Chapter 81
664
Chapter 82
684
Chapter 83
690
Chapter 84
694
Chapter 85
698
Chapter 86
707
Chapter 87
715
Chapter 88
736
Chapter 89
742
Chapter 90
749
Chapter 91
755
Chapter 92
768
Chapter 93
773
Chapter 94
781
Chapter 95
787
Chapter 96
790
Chapter 97
798
Chapter 98
800
Chapter 99
805
Chapter 100
816
Chapter 101
829
Chapter 102
837
Chapter 103
845
Chapter 104
850
Chapter 105
857
Chapter 106
865
Chapter 107
870
Chapter 108
875
Chapter 109
884
Chapter 110
889
Chapter 111
899
Chapter 112
902
Chapter 113
907
Chapter 114
914
Chapter 115
918
Chapter 116
923
Chapter 117
926
Chapter 118
929
Chapter 119
934
Chapter 120
946
Chapter 121
948
Chapter 122
951
Chapter 123
952
Chapter 124
958
Chapter 125
965
Chapter 126
971
Chapter 127
978
Chapter 128
983
Chapter 129
990
Chapter 130
993
Chapter 131
1001
Chapter 132
1004
Chapter 133
1012
Chapter 134
1029
Chapter 135
1045
Epilogue
1066
Endnotes
1068
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction. Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged. By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War. His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, became Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well. Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, along with his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.

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