Moby Dick

The monumental epic of American literature
Herman Melville’s tale of the hunt for the white whale, Moby Dick, is one of the greatest novels of all time. It is at once an adventure story of the high seas, and an exploration of the uncharted regions of the soul. Neglected in Melville’s day, Moby-Dick is now acknowledged as a sublime work of the imagination, an American Odyssey.
‘Call me Ishmael’ is one of the most famous opening sentences ever written. Moby-Dick’s narrator Ishmael is a drifter and former merchant seaman, who departs Nantucket on a perilous whaling mission to the South Seas. With him on the Pequod are the cannibal Queequeg and ‘a heathen crew … whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea’. At the helm is Captain Ahab, whose soul is bent on hunting and killing the great white whale that cost him his leg in an earlier encounter. As they voyage south, Ahab’s obsession takes his crew deeper into the abyss in desperate pursuit of ‘the gliding great demon of the seas of life’.