"Hast Seen the White Whale?"
The first mate is Starbuck (an upright and strict Quaker) and the second mate is Stubb (my favorite character. A happy go lucky guy that is always doing something funny).
There are others but basically they set sail and find out that Captain Ahab is obsessed with catching Moby Dick who happened to take his leg the last time he went whaling.
The whole book is Ahab searching for Moby Dick, Starbuck trying to convince him not to, and Stub entertaining the crew and indeed the reader.
In the end Ahab is consumed by revenge aka he harpoons Moby Dick and gets caught up, thus plunging to a watery grave alongside his ship, his crew, and his foe Moby Dick. Everyone except Ishmael dies. He floats away on Queequeg's coffin (which after Queequeg decided not to die from his previous sickness had been made into a life boat).
Ironically Ismael is picked up by the boat Rachel which had been scouring the seas searching for the captains son, which Ahab had to refuse to look for because he was so mad with revenge.I just finished it and I will say that if you plan on reading Moby Dick you have to have
1) Patience
2) Intelligence
Patience to make it through the extremely dry and detailed descriptions of the whaling process and intelligence enough to remember all of those dry details for future reference. (Lets just say I had to reread a few sections and almost didn't make it...as I lack...both of the above attributes)
The basic plot line is simple enough, but the impact and meaning of the book is lost if you don't pay attention to the seemingly unrelated tangents.
I thought it was kind of fun. There are a bunch of random facts that I really enjoyed and the story line was entertaining and extremely epic!
***Funny side note apparently when Moby Dick was first released in England, the publisher forgot to print the epilogue (which contains Ismael surviving and being saved). Everyone freaked out and said it was a dumb book that didn't make sense because it was narrated by a dead guy.
3 comments:
Funny side note: When Herman Melville died he was extremely poor and unknown, and his name was misprinted as Harry Melville.
That's depressing.
I heard they are making a movie of "Moby Dick", but my expectations are set very low, because the script-writers have literally been quoted saying, "It's not your grandfather's 'Moby Dick.'" They will be making it into an action-adventure revenge story, focusing on all the ships that the White Whale has destroyed, and making Ahab a charismatic, not-crazy leader.
So basically they will be taking out all of the symbolic elements that made 'Moby Dick' a classic in the first place and tooling it up so it is the perfect Hollywood blockbuster.
Sometimes I hate our generation.
Sounds like Harry..er Herman..had a hard life. And it looks like it's only going to get worse
I don't think that movie is going to do anything for his constant insecurity that others won't/don't understand his writing.
,,, poor Harry.
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