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Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) Paperback – December 31, 2002
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This edition features the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's text, approved by the Center for Scholarly Editions and the Center for Editions of American Authors of the MLA.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature.
Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.
Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Print length720 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure730L
- Dimensions7.72 x 5 x 1.68 inches
- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication dateDecember 31, 2002
- ISBN-100142437247
- ISBN-13978-0142437247
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About the Author
Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.
Andrew Delbanco was born in 1952. Educated at Harvard, he has lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. He writes frequently on American culture for many national journals and papers, and has co-directed a number of seminars for high school and college teachers at the National Endowment for the Humanities Center and under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among his previous works are The Death of Satan, Required Reading, A New England Anthology, and The Puritan Ordeal, which received the 1990 Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia University, where he is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities. Mr. Delbanco lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain's Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993), Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus , who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don't sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever to go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.
N o, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal masthead. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tarpot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scale of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who aint a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I t ake it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
Grand Contested Election for the
Presidency of the United States.
WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was we lcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Classics; Revised edition (December 31, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0142437247
- ISBN-13 : 978-0142437247
- Reading age : 9+ years, from customers
- Lexile measure : 730L
- Item Weight : 1.06 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.72 x 5 x 1.68 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #97,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #480 in Sea Stories
- #3,443 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #7,584 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
The writing career of Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) peaked early, with his early novels, such as Typee becoming best sellers. By the mid-1850s his poularity declined sharply, and by the time he died he had been largely forgotten. Yet in time his novel Moby Dick came to be regarded as one of the finest works of American, and indeed world, literature, as was Billy Budd, which was not published until long after his death, in 1924.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2024
Everybody knows the story, so you might think there is no reason to actually read the novel. I just finally read it, and here are some things you don't know if you haven't read it. First, you don't know how funny it is! The first twenty chapters/100 pages, before Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, is mainly a comedy, and there is humor laced throughout the rest of the book. Second, it is full of poetic passages. Melville was heavily influenced by the style of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Third, Melville celebrates democracy, working men, and multi-cultural diversity. Yes, it is full of the mechanics of whaling, which was a deterrent to me when I first tried to read it in the Fall of 1976, but there is so much more!
THE EDITION
There are countless different editions of Moby-Dick as the copyright long since expired, and many are found here at one listing, making selection difficult. The one I read is one I recommend as a reading copy: the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition , which is 625 pages of text with a quite readable typeface. I'm sure the paperback binding could be cracked, which I hate, but I managed to hold it open easily and avoided cracking.
WHALES AND WHALING
Melville was overoptimistic about the ability of whales to survive despite whaling. Moby Dick, of course, wins in the end, but as for non-fictional whales it is a different story. Many species were in serious trouble before the IWC (International Whaling Commission) finally announced a moratorium on whaling in 1982, which is still in effect. Japan left the IWC and resumed whaling in 2019. Norway engages in limited whaling. Native Alaskans continue to hunt, though obviously the numbers are small. But with those exceptions, whaling is no more, and so whales, though still at risk from human activity, are no longer being ruthlessly hunted to extinction, and will hopefully survive the climate change now underway.
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2023
Everybody knows the story, so you might think there is no reason to actually read the novel. I just finally read it, and here are some things you don't know if you haven't read it. First, you don't know how funny it is! The first twenty chapters/100 pages, before Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, is mainly a comedy, and there is humor laced throughout the rest of the book. Second, it is full of poetic passages. Melville was heavily influenced by the style of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Third, Melville celebrates democracy, working men, and multi-cultural diversity. Yes, it is full of the mechanics of whaling, which was a deterrent to me when I first tried to read it in the Fall of 1976, but there is so much more!
THE EDITION
There are countless different editions of Moby-Dick as the copyright long since expired, and many are found here at one listing, making selection difficult. The one I read is one I recommend as a reading copy: the [[ASIN:0143105957 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition]], which is 625 pages of text with a quite readable typeface. I'm sure the paperback binding could be cracked, which I hate, but I managed to hold it open easily and avoided cracking.
WHALES AND WHALING
Melville was overoptimistic about the ability of whales to survive despite whaling. Moby Dick, of course, wins in the end, but as for non-fictional whales it is a different story. Many species were in serious trouble before the IWC (International Whaling Commission) finally announced a moratorium on whaling in 1982, which is still in effect. Japan left the IWC and resumed whaling in 2019. Norway engages in limited whaling. Native Alaskans continue to hunt, though obviously the numbers are small. But with those exceptions, whaling is no more, and so whales, though still at risk from human activity, are no longer being ruthlessly hunted to extinction, and will hopefully survive the climate change now underway.
Melville's storytelling prowess is evident in his vivid depiction of Captain Ahab's relentless pursuit of the enigmatic white whale, Moby Dick. The Kindle Edition enhances the reading experience, allowing readers to easily navigate the extensive narrative, footnotes, and delve into the intricacies of the characters and their maritime adventures.
The brilliance of Melville's prose shines through on the Kindle platform, making it a joy to immerse oneself in the rich language and profound themes that define "Moby Dick." The Kindle features such as adjustable font size, bookmarks, and annotations add a layer of interactivity, making it a personalized reading experience for each user.
The convenience of carrying this literary classic in a Kindle Edition is particularly noteworthy. Whether commuting, traveling, or simply enjoying a quiet evening at home, having "Moby Dick" at your fingertips is a true delight for literature enthusiasts.
Moreover, the Kindle Edition ensures that a new generation of readers can easily discover and appreciate the depth and complexity of Melville's narrative. The ability to highlight passages, search for specific terms, and access a comprehensive dictionary further enriches the reading experience.
In conclusion, the Kindle Edition of "Moby Dick" is a stellar adaptation of a timeless classic. It seamlessly combines the allure of Melville's prose with the modern convenience of digital reading, making it a must-have for literature lovers and an excellent way for newcomers to embark on the epic journey of Ahab and his fateful encounter with the elusive Moby Dick. Highly recommended for anyone looking to experience or revisit this literary gem