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| Herman Melville's Moby-Dick | |
|---|---|
| Name | Moby-Dick |
| Author | Herman Melville |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel, Sea story |
| Publisher | Harper & Brothers |
| Pub date | 1851 |
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is an 1851 novel by Herman Melville that chronicles a whaling voyage led by the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of a giant white sperm whale. Combining narrative modes from adventure fiction, epic poetry, and philosophical essay, the work engages with contemporaneous debates surrounding slavery, industrialization, and scientific exploration. Initially polarizing among critics and readers in the United States and United Kingdom, the novel later became central to modernist and postwar literary canons and influenced writers across France, Germany, Russia, and Japan.
The novel's first-person narrator, Ishmael, journeys from Manhattan to the whaling city of New Bedford and boards the whaler Pequod under Captain Ahab, whose leg was severed by a whale. The voyage includes ports of call such as Nantucket, encounters with ships like the Rachel and the Jeroboam, and detailed expositions on whaling practices influenced by sources including the memoirs of Owen Chase and the reports of the United States Exploring Expedition. Ahab's vengeful quest against the white whale culminates in three climactic encounters, the final collision leading to the sinking of the Pequod and the deaths of its crew, leaving Ishmael as sole survivor rescued by the Rachel. The narrative interleaves action with encyclopedic chapters on cetology, anatomy of the sperm whale, and seafaring lore referencing figures such as Christopher Columbus, Homer, and William Shakespeare.
Principal characters include Ishmael; Captain Ahab; first mate Starbuck, a Quaker from Nantucket; second mate Stubb; third mate Flask; harpooneers Queequeg, Tashtego, and Dagoo; the shipowner Bildad and Peleg; and mysterious figures like Fedallah. Secondary and referenced personae derive from broader culture and history, including allusions to Aeschylus, Plato, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther, Napoleon Bonaparte, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Søren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, James Fenimore Cooper, Isaac Newton, Joseph Hooker, and John Keats appear as intertextual references.
Major themes include obsession and fate as embodied by Ahab and resonant with tragic paradigms from Greek tragedy, the tension between individual will and providence as debated by thinkers like John Calvin and Baruch Spinoza, and racial and cultural plurality exemplified by the mixed crew and references to African-American, Pacific Islander, and Native American traditions. The novel interrogates knowledge and science through cetological digressions invoking Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz, and explores theology and metaphysics via allusions to Book of Job, Genesis, Revelation, and Ecclesiastes. Motifs include the whiteness of the whale linked to cultural significations in works by Melville's contemporaries, symbolic objects such as the ship's ― mast, harpoons, and the doubloon patterned after coins like the Spanish dollar and British pound sterling, and recurrent images borrowed from Iliad and Odyssey epic diction.
Melville drafted early sketches and stories during voyages in the 1830s and 1840s, drawing on real events like the sinking described in Owen Chase's Narrative and the sinking of the whaleship Essex (1820). Writing took place in locations such as Pittsfield, Massachusetts, New York City, and Albany, New York. The novel was published in London by Richard Bentley and in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1851, with variants between the British edition and American edition. Initial reviews in periodicals like The Literary World, The New York Albion, and Blackwood's Magazine ranged from praise to bewilderment. Later rediscovery by scholars such as D.H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and critics associated with Harold Bloom and F.R. Leavis secured the novel's canonical status.
Melville blends narrative modes including first-person narration, dramatic stage directions, Shakespearean soliloquy, and encyclopedic exposition similar to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essays and Francis Bacon's aphorisms. The prose alternates between colloquial sea-talk rooted in Nantucket whaleman jargon and elevated rhetoric recalling John Milton and William Shakespeare, deploying irony, parody, and typographical experiments influenced by Herman Melville's acquaintance with the Romantic movement, the Transcendentalist movement, and classical rhetorics traced to Aristotle and Cicero. The work incorporates drama-like scenes, stage directions, and catalogue lists akin to epic catalogues in Homer and the descriptive registers of naturalists like Alexander von Humboldt.
Contemporary reception was mixed: reviewers in London and New York criticized its digressions and perceived incoherence, while others admired its ambition. The novel's reputation waned during Melville's later life but was rehabilitated in the early 20th century by critics and authors including Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats. Scholarly attention from figures such as M. H. Abrams, F.R. Leavis, Harold Bloom, Sacvan Bercovitch, Newton Arvin, G. Thomas Tanselle, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Olson repositioned the novel within studies of American literature, modernism, and postcolonial critique. Debates continue among critics influenced by New Criticism, New Historicism, Reader-response criticism, and Critical race theory concerning authorial intent, narrative reliability, and depictions of race and imperialism.
The novel inspired stage adaptations in London and New York, silent and sound films including works by John Huston, musical interpretations by Randy Newman and theatrical productions directed by Orson Welles interpreters, and operatic treatments by composers in Germany and France. Influences extend to novelists such as Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Herman Melville's contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, poets including Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, and filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. The book shaped scientific and cultural discussions in institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution and informed museum exhibits in Nantucket Whaling Museum and New Bedford Whaling Museum, while its imagery appears in visual arts by Winslow Homer and Eugène Delacroix, and in popular culture references across comic books, television, and video games.
Category:1851 novelsCategory:American novels