FolioWestern literature

Herman Melville

Realism & Victorian · Novel · 1851

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

Ishmael ships on the Pequod; Ahab hunts the white whale that took his leg. The book is a cetology, a Shakespearean rant, a workers’ epic, and a sermon on the face of the unreadable.

Metaphysical adventure

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
Moby-Dick, ch. 1

Characters

Ishmael

The survivor-narrator who would have been a sermon if the sea had not taken him.

Ahab

The captain whose wound has become a metaphysics, and a crew.

Moby Dick

The whale as blankness, malice, or mere animal—the book will not decide.

Queequeg

The cannibal bosom-friend: the book’s other covenant.

Themes

The unreadable

The whale’s forehead as the world’s refusal to mean one thing.

Command and fellowship

Ahab’s monomania against the ship as a working world.

Motifs

Workplace, grave, and thinking surface.

The ivory leg; the scar; the body that will not forget.

A color that terrifies because it might be nothing.

Three days that were always the whole voyage.

Echoes

Other works that share a motif with this one.

In the Folio

The Wound That Thinks
Ahab’s ivory leg, and the metaphysics a body will not stop writing.

Set beside

Heart of Darkness
Ahab and Kurtz are both voices that have gone too far into an element—whale-road, river—and come back as a philosophy of the unreadable. One names the white; the other cannot name the rite. Both leave a survivor to tell a story that does not save.