Description
Moby-Dick
01 Mar 1999
by Herman Melville
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster
- Language : English
- Pages : 640
- ISBN-10 : ?671028359
- ISBN-13 : 9780671028350
Herman Melville's peerless allegorical masterpiece is the epic saga of the fanatical Captain Ahab, who swears vengeance on the mammoth white whale that has crippled him. Often considered to be the Great American Novel, Moby-Dick is at once a starkly realistic story of whaling, a romance of unusual adventure, and a searing drama of heroic courage, moral conflict, and mad obsession. It is world-renowned as the greatest sea story ever told. Moby-Dick, widely misunderstood in its own time, has since become an indubitable classic of American literature.
Reviews
3.6 rating based on 567,229 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0671028359
ISBN-13: 9780671028350
Goodreads: 2392
Author(s):
Published: //
Written by one of America's greatest authors, Moby-Dick is a work of tremendous power and depth-one of world literature's great poetic epics. In the novel, published in 1851 after sixteen months of writing, Herman Melville recounts the Promethean quest of Captain Ahab, who, having lost a leg in a earlier battle with White Whale, is determined to catch the beast and destroy it. By the time readers meet Ahab, he is a vengeful, crazed, and terror-provoking figure, for Moby Dick has come to represent for him all the evil in the world.
The relentless voyage of Ahab and his crew, a finely etched group of weird and wonderful characters who seem both flesh-and-blood individuals and symbolic of the varying qualities of men, becomes a masterful drama of life at sea. The drama is made more fascinating by Melville's eloquent style-a combination of the journalistic, colloquial, and poetic-and the themes and subjects he pursues-whales and whaling; mean's need for love and comradeship; and the fury of Ahab for the whale.
Through realistic storytelling, symbolic allegory, and allusive and figurative language, Melville achieves in Moby-dicka special intensity that readers will marvel at, and not soon forget.
