Moby Dick Summary
The novel
Moby Dick by
Herman
Melville is an epic tale of the voyage of the whaling ship the
Pequod and its captain, Ahab, who relentlessly pursues the great Sperm Whale
(the title character) during a journey around the world. The narrator of the
novel is
Ishmael,
a sailor on the Pequod who undertakes the journey out of his affection for the
sea.
Moby Dick begins with Ishmael's arrival in New Bedford as he
travels toward Nantucket. He rests at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford, where he
meets
Queequeg,
a harpooner from New Zealand who will also sail on the Pequod. Although
Queequeg appears dangerous, he and Ishmael must share a bed together and the
narrator quickly grows fond of the somewhat uncivilized harpooner. Queequeg is
actually the son of a High Chief who left New Zealand because of his desire to
learn among Christians. The next day, Ishmael attends a church service and
listens to a sermon by
Father Mapple,
a renowned preacher who delivers a sermon considering Jonah and the whale that
concludes that the tale is a lesson to preacher Truth in the face of Falsehood.
On a schooner to Nantucket, Ishmael and Queequeg come across
a local bumpkin who mocks Queequeg. However, when this bumpkin is swept
overboard, Queequeg saves him. In Nantucket, Queequeg and Ishmael choose
between three ships for a year journey, and decide upon the Pequod. The Captain
of the Pequod,
Peleg,
is now retired, and merely owns the boat with another Quaker,
Bildad.
Peleg tells them of the new captain, Ahab, and immediately describes him as a
grand and ungodly man. Before leaving for their voyage, Ishmael and Queequeg
come across a stranger named
Elijahwho
predicts disaster on their journey. Before leaving on the Pequod, Elijah again
predicts disaster.
Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, where
Captain Ahab is
still unseen, secluded in his own cabin. Peleg and Bildad consult with
Starbuck,
the first mate. He is a Quaker and a Nantucket native who is quite practical.
The second mate is
Stubb,
a Cape Cod native with a more jovial and carefree attitude. The third is
Flask,
a Martha's Vineyard native with a pugnacious attitude. Melville introduces the
rest of the crew, including the Indian harpooner
Tashtego,
the African harpooner
Daggoo.
Several days into the voyage, Ahab finally appears as a man
seemingly made of bronze who stands on an ivory leg fashioned from whalebone.
He eventually gets into a violent argument with Stubb when the second mate
makes a joke at Ahab's expense, and kicks him. This leads Stubb to dream of
kicking Ahab's ivory leg off, but Flask claims that the kick from Ahab is a sign
of honor.
At last, Ahab tells the crew of the Pequod to look for a
white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow: Moby Dick, the legendary whale that
took Ahab's leg. Starbuck tells Ahab that his obsession with Moby Dick is
madness, but Ahab claims that all things are masks and there is some unknown
reasoning behind that mask that man must strike through. For Ahab, Moby Dick is
that mask. Ahab himself seems to recognize his own madness. Starbuck begins to
worry that the ship is overmatched by the mad captain and knows that he will
see an impious end to Ahab.
While Queequeg and Ishmael weave a sword-mat for lashing to
their boat, the Pequod soon comes upon a whale and Ahab orders his crew to
their boats. Ahab orders his special crew, which Ishmael compares to "phantoms,"
to their boats. The crew attacks a whale and Queequeg does strike it, but this
is insufficient to kill it. Among the "phantoms" in the boat is
Fedallah,
a sinister Parsee.
After passing the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod comes across
the Goney (Albatross), another ship on its voyage. Ahab asks whether they have
seen Moby Dick as the ships pass one another, but Ahab cannot hear his answer.
The mere passing of the ships is unorthodox behavior, for ships will generally
have a 'gam,' a meeting between two ships. The Pequod does have a gam with the
next ship it encounters, the Town-Ho.
Ishmael interrupts his narration to tell a story that was
told to him by the crew of the Town-Ho, just as he would tell it to a circle of
Spanish friends after his journey on the Pequod. The story concerns the near
mutiny on the Town-Ho and its eventual conflict with Moby Dick.
The Pequod does vanquish the next whale that it comes
across, as Stubb strikes a whale with his harpoon. However, as the crew of the
Pequod attempts to bring the whale into the ship, sharks attack the carcass and
Queequeg nearly loses his hand while fending them off.
The Pequod next comes upon the Jeroboam, a Nantucket ship
afflicted with an epidemic. Stubb later tells a story about the Jeroboam and a
mutiny that occurred on this ship because of a Shaker prophet,
Gabriel,
on board. The captain of the Jeroboam, Mayhew, warns Ahab about Moby Dick.
After vanquishing a Sperm Whale, Stubb next also kills a
Right Whale. Although this is not on the ship's agenda, the Pequod pursues a
Right Whale because of the good omens associated with having the head of a
Sperm Whale and a head of a Right Whale on a ship. Stubb and Flask discuss
rumors that Ahab has sold his soul to Fedallah.
The next ship that the Pequod meets is the Jungfrau
(Virgin), a German ship in desperate need of oil. The Pequod competes with the
Virgin for a large whale, and the Pequod is successful in defeating it.
However, the whale carcass begins to sink as the Pequod attempts to secure it
and thus the Pequod must abandon it. The Pequod next finds a large group of
Sperm Whales and injures several of them, but only captures a single one.
Stubb concocts a plan to swindle the next ship that the
Pequod meets, the French ship Bouton-de-Rose (Rosebud), of ambergris. Stubb
tells them that the whales that they have vanquished are useless and could
damage their ship, and when the Rosebud leaves these behind the Pequod takes
them in order to gain the ambergris in one of them.
Several days after encountering the Rosebud, a young black
man on the boat,
Pippin,
becomes frightened while lowering after a whale and jumps from the boat,
becoming entangled in the whale line. Stubb chastises him for his cowardice and
tells him that he will be left at sea if he jumps again. When Pippin (Pip) does
the same thing again, Stubb remains true to his word and Pip only survives
because a nearby boat saves him. Nevertheless, Pip loses his sanity from the
event.
The next ship that the Pequod encounters, a British ship
called the Samuel Enderby, bears news of Moby Dick but its crewman
Dr. Bunger warns
Ahab to leave the whale alone. Later, Ahab's leg breaks and the carpenter must
fix it. Ahab behaves scornfully toward the carpenter. When Starbuck learns that
the casks have sprung a leak, he goes to Ahab's cabin to report the news. Ahab
disagrees with Starbuck's advice on the matter, and becomes so enraged that he
pulls a musket on Starbuck. Although Ahab warns Starbuck that there is but one
God on Earth and one Captain on the Pequod, Starbuck tells him that he will be
no danger to Ahab, for Ahab is sufficient danger to himself. Ahab does relent
to Starbuck's advice.
Queequeg becomes ill from fever and seems to approach death,
so he asks for a canoe to serve as a coffin. The carpenter measures Queequeg
for his coffin and builds it, but Queequeg returns to health, claiming that he
willed his own recovery. Queequeg keeps the coffin and uses it as a sea chest.
Upon reaching the Pacific Ocean, Ahab asks
Perth the
blacksmith to forge a harpoon to use against Moby Dick. Perth fashions a
harpoon that Ahab demands be tempered with the blood of his pagan harpooners,
and he howls out that he baptizes the harpoon in the name of the devil.
The next ship that the Pequod meets is the Bachelor, a
Nantucket ship whose captain denies the existence of Moby Dick. The next day,
the Pequod slays four whales, and that night Ahab dreams of hearses. He and Fedallah
pledge to slay Moby Dick and survive the conflict, and Ahab boasts of his own
immortality.
Ahab must soon decide between an easy route past the Cape of
Good Hope back to Nantucket and a difficult route in pursuit of Moby Dick. Ahab
easily chooses to continue his quest. The Pequod soon comes upon a typhoon on
its journey in the Pacific, and while battling this storm the Pequod's compass
moves out of alignment. When Starbuck learns this and goes to Ahab's cabin to
tell him, he finds the old man asleep. Starbuck considers shooting Ahab with
his musket, but he cannot move himself to shoot his captain after he hears Ahab
cry in his sleep "Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last."
The next morning after the typhoon, Ahab corrects the
problem with the compass despite the skepticism of his crew and the ship
continues on its journey. Ahab learns that Pip has gone insane and offers his
cabin to the poor boy. The Pequod comes upon yet another ship, the Rachel,
whose captain, Gardiner, knows Ahab. He requests the Pequod's help in searching
for Gardiner's son, who may be lost at sea, but Ahab flatly refuses when he
learns that Moby Dick is nearby. The final ship that the Pequod meets is the
Delight, a ship that has recently come upon Moby Dick and has nearly been destroyed
by its encounter with the whale. Before finally finding Moby Dick, Ahab
reminisces about the day nearly forty years before in which he struck his first
whale, and laments the solitude of his years out on the sea. He admits that he
has chased his prey as more of a demon than a man.
The struggle against Moby Dick lasts three days. On the
first day, Ahab spies the whale himself, and the whaling boats row after it.
Moby Dick attacks Ahab's boat, causing it to sink, but Ahab survives the ordeal
when he reaches Stubb's boat. Despite this first failed attempt at defeating
the whale, Ahab pursues him for a second day. On the second day of the chase,
roughly the same defeat occurs. This time Moby Dick breaks Ahab's ivory leg,
while Fedallah dies when he becomes entangled in the harpoon line and is
drowned. After this second attack, Starbuck chastises Ahab, telling him that
his pursuit is impious and blasphemous. Ahab declares that the chase against
Moby Dick is immutably decreed, and pursues it for a third day.
On the third day of the attack against Moby Dick, Starbuck
panics for ceding to Ahab's demands, while Ahab tells Starbuck that "some
ships sail from their ports and ever afterwards are missing," seemingly
admitting the futility of his mission. When Ahab and his crew reach Moby Dick,
Ahab finally stabs the whale with his harpoon but the whale again tips Ahab's
boat. However, the whale rams the Pequod and causes it to begin sinking. In a
seemingly suicidal act, Ahab throws his harpoon at Moby Dick but becomes
entangled in the line and goes down with it. Only Ishmael survives this attack,
for he was fortunate to be on a whaling boat instead of on the Pequod.
Eventually he is rescued by the Rachel as its captain continues his search for
his missing son, only to find a different orphan.
Characters :
Ishmael
The name has come to symbolize
orphans,
exiles, and social
outcasts in the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells the reader that he has turned to the
sea out of a feeling of
alienation from human society. In the last
line of the book, Ishmael also refers to himself symbolically as an orphan,
which maintains the Biblical connection and emphasises the representation of
outcasts. In the Book of Genesis, Ishmael is the son of Abraham and his wife's
maidservant, Hagar, whom his barren wife, Sarah, gives to her husband so he may
have a son. When Sarah finally bears a son, Isaac, she decides Ishmael would
not be a good influence on Isaac and therefore has Abraham exile Hagar and
Ishmael into the desert .
Ishmael has a rich literary background (he has previously
been a schoolteacher), which he brings to bear on his shipmates and events that
occur while at sea. His assurance that "only I alone escaped to tell
you" (tell thee) is the messenger's admonishment in Job 1: 15-17, 19.
Elijah
The character Elijah (named for the
Biblical prophet Elijah, who is
also referred to in the
King James
Bible as
Elias), on learning that Ishmael and Queequeg have signed onto
Ahab's ship, asks, "Anything down there about your
souls?" When Ishmael
reacts with surprise, Elijah continues:
Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly.
"No matter though, I know many chaps that hav'n't got any — good luck
to 'em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth
wheel to a wagon."
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 19
Later in the conversation, Elijah adds:
Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will
be; and then again, perhaps it wont be, after all. Any how, it's all fixed and
arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as
well these as any other men, God pity 'em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning;
the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry I stopped ye.
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 19
Ahab
Moby Dick
Ahab is the tyrannical captain of the Pequod who is driven by a
monomaniacal desire
to kill Moby Dick, the whale that had maimed him off the coast of
Japan during a
previous whaling voyage. Although he is a
Quaker, he seeks revenge in defiance of
his religion's well-known
pacifism.
Ahab's Biblical namesake is the evil idol-worshipping ruler in
the
Book of Kings, and this association prompts
Ishmael to ask, after first hearing Ahab's name:
—Moby-Dick , Chapter 16. "The Ship"
When Ishmael remarks upon the ill associations of such a
name, he is rebuked by one of Ahab's colleagues, who points out that "He
did not name himself."
Little information is provided about Ahab's life prior to
meeting Moby Dick, although it is known that he was
orphaned at
a young age. When discussing the purpose of his quest with Starbuck, it is
revealed that he first began whaling at eighteen and has continued in the trade
for forty years making him 58 years of age
and having spent less
than three on land. He also mentions his "girl-wife", whom he married
late in life, and their young son, but does not give their names.
Ahab ultimately dooms the crew of the Pequod (save for Ishmael) to
death by his obsession with Moby Dick. During the final chase, Ahab hurls his
last harpoon while yelling his now-famous revenge line:
…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab
at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
—Moby-Dick, Chapter 135. "The Chase.—Third
Day"
The harpoon becomes lodged in Moby Dick's flesh and Ahab,
caught around the neck by a loop in his own harpoon's rope and unable to free
himself, is dragged down into the cold oblivion of the sea by the injured
whale. The mechanics of Ahab's death are richly symbolic. He is killed by his
own harpoon, a victim of his own twisted obsession and desire for revenge. The
whale eventually destroys the whaleboats and crew, and sinks the Pequod.
Ahab's motivation for hunting Moby Dick is explored in the
following passage:
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in
them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That
intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even
the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites
of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and
worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred
white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most
maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with
malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the
whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole
race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his
hot heart's shell upon it.
—Moby-Dick, Chapter 41. "Moby Dick"
Captain Boomer
Captain of the Samuel
Enderby of London, Ahab encounters him at sea. Boomer has not only
seen Moby Dick recently, but lost his arm to him in a previous attack. Like
Ahab, he has replaced the missing limb with a prosthesis made of sperm whale
bone. Ahab immediately assumes he has found a kindred spirit in his thirst for
vengeance, but Boomer is yet another representation of the duality to be found
throughout the novel; in this instance, a sane and rational counterpart to
Ahab. While Boomer also anthropomorphizes Moby Dick, describing the
"boiling rage" the whale seemed to be in when Boomer attempted to
capture him, he has easily come to terms with losing his arm, and harbors no
ill-will against Moby Dick, advising Ahab "he's best left alone". TheEnderby's doctor provides solid
reasoning for this attitude, informing the gathering:
Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the
whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite
impossible for him to completely digest even a man's arm? And he knows it too.
So that what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For
he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints..
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 100
Boomer jokingly tells a long yarn about the loss of his arm;
this attitude, coupled with a lack of urgency in telling where he sighted Moby
Dick, infuriates Ahab, leading Boomer to query, "Is your captain
crazy?" Ahab immediately quits the Enderby and is so hasty in his return to the Pequod that he cracks and
splinters his whalebone leg, then further damages it in admonishing the
helmsman. While appearing to be whole, the leg is badly damaged and cannot be
trusted; it now serves as metaphor for its wearer.
Moby Dick
He is a giant, largely (but not completely) white, bull
sperm whale and
arguably the main
antagonist of the novel. Melville describes him as having
prominent white areas around his wrinkled forehead and dorsal fin, the rest of
his body being of stripes and patches between white and gray. The animal's
exact dimensions are never given but Melville claims in the novel that sperm
whales can reach a length of ninety feet
(larger than any
officially recorded) and that Moby Dick is possibly the largest sperm whale
that ever lived. Other notable physical traits are an unusual spout, a deformed
jaw, three punctures in his right
fluke and
several harpoons imbedded in his side from unsuccessful hunts.
Having
a near legendary reputation among whalers, several fatal encounters have been
attributed to him over a number of years, his attacks interpreted by some as
being deliberate acts not of "an unintelligent agent." He bit
off Ahab's leg, leaving Ahab to swear revenge. The
cetacean also
attacked the Rachel and
killed the captain's son. At the end of the story he kills the entire crew of
the Pequod, with the
exception of Ishmael. The story does not tell whether he survives his own
wounds after that. Although he is an integral part of the novel, Moby Dick
appears in just three of the 135 chapters and the reader does not have access
to his thoughts and motivations. Moby Dick is considered to be a symbol of a
number of things, among them God, nature, fate, the ocean, and the very universe
itself.
The symbolism of the White Whale is deliberately enigmatic,
and its inscrutability is a deliberate challenge to the reader. Ishmael
describes the whale’s forehead as having wrinkles and scars on it that look
like hieroglyphics, and recounts:
If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages,
could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle
meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the
Sperm Whale’s brow? I put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 79
All the reader can know is that the White Whale symbolizes
many things to various characters in the novel. It is their personal
interpretations of Moby-Dick, in addition to their individual ruminations on
the
gold doubloon Ahab has nailed to the mast
to motivate his crew, that serve as a further clue to their own inner makeup.
Mates
The three mates of the Pequod are all from
New England.
Starbuck
Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a
deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore
strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which
in some organization seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than
from ignorance... [H]is far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and
child, tend[ed] to bend him ... from the original ruggedness of his nature, and
open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted
men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the
more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my
boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this,
he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that
which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an
utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 26
Little is said about Starbuck's early life, except that he
is married with a son. Unlike Ahab's wife, who remains nameless, Starbuck gives
his wife's name as Mary. Such is his desire to return to them, that when nearly
reaching the last leg of their quest for Moby Dick, he considers arresting or even
killing Ahab with a loaded
musket, one of several kept by Ahab (in a previous chapter
Ahab threatens Starbuck with one when Starbuck disobeys him, despite Starbuck's
being in the right), and turning the ship back, straight for home.
Starbuck is alone among the crew in objecting to Ahab's
quest, declaring it madness to want revenge on an animal, which lacks reason;
such a desire is blasphemous to his Quaker religion. Starbuck advocates continuing
the more mundane pursuit of whales for their oil. But he lacks the support of
the crew in his opposition to Ahab, and is unable to persuade them to turn
back. Despite his misgivings, he feels himself bound by his obligations to obey
the captain.
Stubb
Stubb, the
second mate of
the Pequod, is from
Cape Cod,
and always seems to have a pipe in his mouth and a smile on his face.
"Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his whaleboat as if
the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited
guests." (Moby-Dick, Ch.
27) Although he is not an educated man, Stubb is remarkably articulate, and
during whale hunts keeps up an imaginative patter reminiscent of that of some
characters in Shakespeare. Scholarly portrayals range from that of an
optimistic simpleton to a paragon of lived philosophic wisdom.
[40]
Flask
Harpooneers
Queequeg
Queequeg hails from the fictional island of Rokovoko in
the South Seas, inhabited by a
cannibal tribe,
and is the son of the chief of his tribe. Since leaving the island, he has
become extremely skilled with the
harpoon.
He befriends Ishmael very early in the novel, when they meet in
New Bedford,
Massachusetts before
leaving for
Nantucket. He is described as existing in a state between
civilized and savage. For example, Ishmael recounts with amusement how Queequeg
feels it necessary to hide himself when pulling on his boots, noting that if he
were a savage he would not consider boots necessary, but if he were completely
civilized he would realize there was no need to be modest when pulling on his
boots.
Queequeg is the harpooneer on Starbuck's boat, where Ishmael
is also an oarsman. Queequeg is best friends with Ishmael in the story. He is
prominent early in the novel, but later fades in significance, as does Ishmael.
Tashtego
Tashtego is described as a
Gay Head (
Wampanoag)
Native American harpooneer.
The personification of the hunter, he turns from hunting land animals to
hunting whales. Tashtego is the harpooneer on Stubb's boat.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most
westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island
of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they
usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers.
—Moby-Dick, Ch.27
Daggoo
Daggoo is a gigantic (6' 5") African harpooneer from a
coastal village with a noble bearing and grace. He is the harpooneer on Flask's
boat.
Fedallah
Fedallah is the harpooneer on Ahab's boat. He is of Persian
Zoroastrian ("
Parsi")
descent. He is described as having lived in China. At the time when the Pequod sets sail, Fedallah is
hidden on board, and he emerges with Ahab's boat's crew later on, to the
surprise of the crew. Fedallah is referred to in the text as Ahab's "Dark
Shadow". Ishmael calls him a "fire worshipper" and the crew speculates
that he is a
devil in
man's disguise. He is the source of a variety of prophecies regarding Ahab and
his hunt for Moby Dick. Ishmael describes him thus, standing by Ahab's boat:
The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart,
with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled
Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black
trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a
glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and
round upon his head.
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 48
Moral Value :
Don’t give up for
what happen to yourself and don’t give up to make your dream came true eventhough
there are so many problem that we must faced, we must strong and fight for it
