Reading Order
Moby-Dick Reading Order
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville is a novel narrated by Ishmael, a young man who signs on as a sailor on the whaling ship Pequod out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The Pequod's captain, Ahab, is a monomaniacal New Englander whose leg was taken by a great white sperm whale named Moby Dick on a previous voyage, and who has devoted himself entirely to pursuing and killing the whale as an act of metaphysical revenge. The novel is simultaneously a novel of adventure, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the nineteenth-century whaling industry, a meditation on obsession and fate, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of evil and the limits of human knowledge, and one of the most formally ambitious works of American literature. Ishmael's narration ranges from comedy to tragedy, from technical precision to lyric excess, from direct address to Shakespearean drama; the novel contains chapters that are pure drama, chapters that are pure essay, chapters that are pure lists, and chapters that seem to be doing something that has never been done in fiction before. It was a commercial failure at publication and is now consistently ranked among the greatest novels in any language.
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Moby-Dick (1851)
Complete Moby-Dick Book List
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Moby-Dick
Herman Melville·1851
Moby-Dick — Frequently Asked Questions
What does the white whale symbolize in Moby-Dick?
Moby Dick has been interpreted as a symbol of almost everything: God, Nature, evil, the unconscious, the limits of human knowledge, American imperialism, the unknowable, the indifferent universe, and pure chance. Ahab's reading of the whale — as a mask behind which lurks the malign force that willed his destruction, a mask he can 'strike through' by killing the physical creature — is explicitly stated in the novel's most famous soliloquy ('The quarter-deck'). Ishmael's reading is different: he insists on the whale's ambiguity, its multiple possible meanings, and the impossibility of any single interpretive framework capturing its full significance. The whale is, among other things, whatever the reader's interpretive framework requires it to be — and the novel's refusal to resolve this ambiguity is one of its formal achievements.
Who is Ishmael and why does he survive?
Ishmael is the novel's narrator — 'Call me Ishmael' is the first line — a young man with some education who chooses to go to sea when he feels oppressed by life on land. He is not the protagonist (Ahab is), but he is the consciousness through which the reader experiences everything; his narration ranges from direct address to the reader to passages of philosophical meditation to technical instruction. Ishmael survives the Pequod's destruction by clinging to Queequeg's coffin (which has been converted into a life buoy) — the only survivor, he is picked up by the Rachel, which has been searching for its own missing crew members. Ishmael's survival is significant partly because it is unearned: he has done nothing heroic, has not resisted Ahab, has participated in the voyage that destroys everyone else. His survival simply happens, and this arbitrariness is part of what the novel is saying about fate.
Why is Moby-Dick considered so difficult?
Moby-Dick is long (approximately 600-800 pages depending on edition), formally varied (mixing narrative, essay, drama, catalogue, and lyric into a single work), and densely allusive (drawing on the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Rabelais, and a vast range of other sources). Its most notorious chapters — the 'cetology' chapters on the biology and classification of whales, the chapters on the mechanics of whaling — have put off many readers who encounter them as interruptions of the narrative. The novel also requires the reader to tolerate extended passages of philosophical meditation and to follow an argument about the nature of obsession, knowledge, and fate that does not resolve neatly. The difficulty is also, however, the source of its power: a novel that required less would say less.
Is there a simpler way into Melville?
Yes. 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' (1853) is a short story about a law copyist who one day begins refusing tasks with the phrase 'I would prefer not to,' and is one of the most compact and perfectly realized things Melville wrote — it can be read in an hour and gives an immediate sense of Melville's voice and themes without the encyclopedic scale of Moby-Dick. 'Benito Cereno' (1855) is a longer novella about a sea captain who boards a seemingly distressed slave ship and slowly comes to understand the reality of what is happening — a narrative about the limits of the white American narrator's comprehension of the slave trade that is one of Melville's most discussed works. Billy Budd, Sailor (posthumously published 1924) is a short novella about a handsome, gentle sailor who is sentenced to death for an act of violence he cannot quite explain — Melville's last work and, for many readers, his most perfectly realized.
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