Moby-Dick

In one sentence: Herman Melville's 1851 novel follows Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale that took his leg, a chase he turns into a lawsuit against God himself, one that costs the entire crew their lives except for the sailor telling the story, Ishmael.

Overview

Ishmael, wanting a taste of life as a whaler, befriends the tattooed harpooner Queequeg, and the two sign onto a whaling ship, the Pequod. Captain Ahab, walking on an ivory peg leg, announces the voyage has one purpose: find the white whale, Moby Dick, and kill it. Partway through, the Pequod crosses paths with another ship, the Rachel, whose captain asks Ahab for help finding his own lost son; Ahab, fixed on the whale, refuses. When they finally find Moby Dick, the chase runs three days. On the third, the whale rams and sinks the Pequod; Ahab goes hand to hand with it, lands a harpoon, and gets dragged under with it. The whole crew dies except Ishmael, pulled from the water by the one ship Ahab had already turned away, the Rachel. This is a full-length novel, its plot interrupted throughout by encyclopedic digressions on the whaling industry.

Why It's Recommended

The book's real weight isn't in man versus whale, it's in how Ahab turns the hunt into a lawsuit against God. Ishmael's own account of himself, that everyone is a slave to something and gets knocked around by the world one way or another, is a kind of peace with a world built to knock people around, and he keeps living because of it. Ahab's answer is the opposite: talk not to him of blasphemy, he'd strike the sun if it insulted him. He accepts nothing, not even from God, convinced he alone sees through a world run like an unaccountable tyranny while everyone else is fooled, and he goes so far as to baptize his harpoon in a ritual that turns revenge into religion. The whale itself carries three overlapping identities through the novel: sometimes God, sometimes evil itself, sometimes a stand-in for an empty, godless universe, and its indefinite whiteness is the novel's own image for that void. The obsession takes down almost everyone, Ahab included, and Ishmael's survival comes down to something closer to luck than insight, luck and a ship that had already been turned away once.

Source

Wisecrack's Thug Notes covers Moby-Dick in its 2013-10-08 episode, reading the whale as God, evil, and the void layered into a single symbol, and closing on the line "but keep floating, homies, cuz somewhere out there we all got our own Rachel that's there to save us."