Moby Dick

About this book

Ishmael joins the whaling ship Pequod and finds a crew bound not only to commerce but to their captain's private vengeance. Ahab has fixed his soul on pursuing Moby Dick, the white whale that took his leg, and the voyage becomes a meditation on fate, faith, and the hunger to impose meaning on an indifferent world. Melville fills the narrative with cetology, sermon, comedy, and storm, a vast American novel that reads like an ocean itself. Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, and Fedallah share the deck with philosophical digressions and lyrical force. For readers ready to commit, it is one of literature's great journeys.