Moby Dick by Herman Melville (readera ebook reader .txt) 📕
Description
“Call me Ishmael” says Moby Dick’s protagonist, and with this famous first line launches one of the acclaimed great American novels. Part adventure story, part quest for vengeance, part biological textbook and part whaling manual, Moby Dick was first published in 1851. The story follows Ishmael as he abandons his humdrum life on shore for an adventure on the waves. Finding the whaler Pequod at harbour in Nantucket, he signs up for a three year term without meeting the Captain of the ship, a mysterious figure called Ahab. It is only well into the voyage that Ahab’s thirst for vengeance against the eponymous white whale Moby Dick—and the consequences—become clear.
The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years travelling the world in the early 1840s. Herman used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopaedic quality at times. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that’s being painted.
Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially omitted epilogue.
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- Author: Herman Melville
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And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.
In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits—the mainmast and the mizzen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle—his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals—breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awestruck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.
And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates—Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft—“Man the mastheads!”—and all through the day,
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