Summary Moby Dick, or White Whale Herman Melville

Herman Melville
Moby Dick, or White Whale
A young American with the biblical name Ishmael (in the book of Genesis it is said of Ishmael, the son of Abraham: “He will be among people like a wild ass, his hands on everyone and everyone’s hands on him”), bored with being on land and experiencing difficulties in money, accepts the decision to go sailing on a whaler. In the first half of the XIX century. the oldest American whaling port of Nantucket – is by no means the largest center of this fishery, however, Izmail considers it important for him to hire a ship in Nantakeet. Stopping on the way there in a different port city where it’s not surprising to meet on the street a savage who replenished on the unknown islands the crew of a whaler who visited there, where you can see a buffet rack made of a huge whale jaw, where even a preacher in the church rises to the pulpit on a rope ladder – Ishmael listens to the passionate sermon about the

prophet Jonah, who was absorbed by the prophet, trying to avoid the path appointed to him by God, and meets the hotel with a native harpooner Quiqueg. They become bosom friends and decide to join the ship together.
In Nantucket, they are hired by the Pekod whaler, preparing to enter a three-year round-the-world voyage. Here Ishmael learns that Captain Ahab (Ahab in the Bible is the wicked king of Israel who established the cult of Baal and persecuted the prophets), under whose guidance he is to go to sea, on his previous voyage, combating with the whale, lost his leg and has not come out since from a sullen melancholy, and on the ship, on the way home, even stayed for a while out of his mind. But neither this news nor other strange events that make you think about any secrets connected with the “Pecodo” and its captain, Izmail still does not attach importance. Met on a wharf stranger who ventured into vague but formidable prophecies about the fate of the whaler and all enrolled in his team, he takes for a madman or a scammer-beggar.
Only a few days after sailing from Nantucket, Captain Ahab leaves his cabin and appears on the deck. Ishmael is struck by his gloomy appearance and imprinted on his face by an unbearable internal pain. In the decks of the deck floor, holes are drilled in advance, so that Ahab can strengthen the bone leg made of the sperm whale’s polished jaw, and keep his balance during rolling. Observers on the masts were ordered to look out for the whale in the sea. The captain is morbidly closed, even more rigid than usual, demands unconditional and immediate obedience, and his own speeches and actions sharply refuse to explain even to his assistants, whom they often cause bewilderment. “The soul of Ahab,” says Ishmael, “was harsh in the windy winter of his old age, hid in the hollow trunk of his body and sucked morosely the paw of darkness there.”
For the first time Ishmael, who went to sea on a whaler, observes the features of a fishing vessel, work and life on it. In the short chapters, of which the whole book is composed, there are descriptions of tools, techniques and rules for hunting for sperm whales and extracting spermacetas from his head. Other chapters, “cetaceans” – from the book of the collection of references to whales in a variety of literature pre-detailed to detailed reviews of the whale’s tail, fountain, skeleton, whales from bronze and stone, even whales among the stars – throughout the novel supplement the narrative and join with him, reporting a new, metaphysical dimension to events.
Once, on the orders of Ahab, the team of the “Pecoda” gathers. The golden Ecuadorian doublet is nailed to the mast. It is intended for those who first notice an albino whale, famous among whalers and dubbed Moby Dick. This sperm whale, terrifying by its size and ferocity, whiteness and unusual cunning, carries in its skin a lot of once harpoons directed at it, but in all battles with the man remains a winner, and the devastating rebuff that people received from him, many accustomed to thinking, that hunting for him threatens with terrible disasters. It was Moby Dick who stripped Ahab of his feet when the captain, finding himself at the end of the chase among the wreckage of the whale-busted whaleboats, rushed at him with a knife in his hand in a fit of blind hatred. Now Ahab declares that he intends to pursue this whale in all the seas of both hemispheres, While the white carcass does not shake in the waves and will not release its last, black blood, fountain. In vain, the first assistant, Starbeck, a stern Quaker, objected to him, that revenge on the being, devoid of reason, affecting only the blind instinct – insanity and blasphemy. In everything, Ahab answers, they look through the senseless mask with the unknown features of some sensible principle; and if you must razit – razi through this mask! White whale obsessively swims before his eyes as the embodiment of all evil. With rapture and rage, deceiving his own fear, the sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people. In vain, the first assistant, Starbeck, a stern Quaker, objected to him, that revenge on the being, devoid of reason, affecting only the blind instinct – insanity and blasphemy. In everything, Ahab answers, they look through the senseless mask with the unknown features of some sensible principle; and if you must razit – razi through this mask! White whale obsessively swims before his eyes as the embodiment of all evil. With rapture and rage, deceiving his own fear, the sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people. In vain, the first assistant, Starbeck, a stern Quaker, objected to him, that revenge on the being, devoid of reason, affecting only the blind instinct – insanity and blasphemy. In everything, Ahab answers, they look through the senseless mask with the unknown features of some sensible principle; and if you must razit – razi through this mask! White whale obsessively swims before his eyes as the embodiment of all evil. With rapture and rage, deceiving his own fear, the sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people. – madness and blasphemy. In everything, Ahab answers, they look through the senseless mask with the unknown features of some sensible principle; and if you must razit – razi through this mask! White whale obsessively swims before his eyes as the embodiment of all evil. With rapture and rage, deceiving his own fear, the sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people. – madness and blasphemy. In everything, Ahab answers, they look through the senseless mask with the unknown features of some sensible principle; and if you must razit – razi through this mask! White whale obsessively swims before his eyes as the embodiment of all evil. With rapture and rage, deceiving his own fear, the sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people. sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people. sailors join his curses Moby Dick. Three harpoonmen, filling with rum inverted tips of their harpoons, drink for the death of a white whale. And only the ship’s boy, little negro Pip, is praying to God for salvation from these people.
When the “Pecod” first meets the sperm whale and the whaleboats are preparing to be launched, five dark-faced ghosts suddenly appear among the sailors. This is the team of the whaling of Ahab himself, coming from some islands in South Asia. Since the owners of the “Pecoda”, believing that during the hunt for the one-legged captain can no longer be of the sense, did not provide rowers for his own boat, he led them to the ship in secret and still hid in the hold. Their leader is the sinister species of elderly Pars Fedalla.
Although any delay in the search for Moby Dick is excruciating for Ahab, he can not completely abandon the production of whales. Bending around the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the Indian Ocean, “Pecod” leads the hunt and fills the barrels with spermaceti. But the first thing Ahab asks when he meets with other ships: did not it happen to see a white whale. And the answer is often the story of how thanks to Moby Dick, one of the team was killed or mutilated. Even in the middle of the ocean, it does not do without prophecies: a half-crazed sailor-sectarian with a ship stricken with an epidemic conjures to be afraid of the fate of the sacrilegious who dared to engage in the struggle with the incarnation of God’s wrath. Finally, “Pecod” converges with the English whaler, whose captain, having slandered Moby Dick, got a deep wound and as a result lost his hand. Ahab hastens to go up to him aboard and talk with a man whose fate is so similar to his fate. The Englishman does not even think of taking revenge on the sperm whale, but he indicates the direction in which the white whale left. Again Starback tries to stop his captain – and again in vain. At the request of Ahab, the ship’s blacksmith forges a harpoon of particularly hard steel, for which three harpooners donate their blood. “Pecod” goes into the Pacific Ocean.
A friend of Ishmael, the harpooner Quiqueg, fell seriously ill from working in the raw hold, feels the approach of death and asks the carpenter to make him an unsinkable coffin coffin in which he could set off along the waves to the star archipelagoes. And when suddenly his condition changes for the better, the coffin unnecessary until the time has been decided to be worn out and zamolit to turn it into a big float – a rescue buoy. The new buoy, as it should be, is suspended at the stern of “Pecoda”, much surprising by its characteristic form of the command of the oncoming ships.
At night in the whaleboat, near the dead whale, Fedall declares to the captain that in this voyage neither the coffin nor the hearse is destined, but two hearse should see Ahab on the sea before dying: one – built with inhuman hands, and the second one, produced in America; that only hemp can cause Ahab to die, and even in this last hour Fedal himself will go ahead of him by the pilot. The captain does not believe: where does hemp, rope? He is too old, he will not get on the gallows.
All the more clear signs of approaching Moby Dick. In a ferocious storm St. Elmo’s fire flares up on the point of a harpoon forged on a white whale. That same night, Starbeck, confident that Ahab is leading the ship to an imminent death, stands at the door of the captain’s cabin with a musket in his hand and still does not commit murder, preferring to submit to fate. The storm is remagnetizing the compasses, now they are directing the ship away from these waters, but in time having noticed it, Ahab makes new arrows out of sailing needles. The sailor breaks off the mast and disappears in the waves. “Pecod” meets “Rachel”, pursuing Moby Dick only the day before. The captain of Rachel begs Ahab to join the search for the whaleboat lost in yesterday’s hunting, in which his twelve-year-old son was also, but gets a sharp refusal. Henceforth, Ahab himself ascends to the mast: it is pulled in a basket woven from ropes. But it costs him to be upstairs, as a sea hawk tears off his hat and carries him to the sea. Again the ship – and on it, too, buried sailors killed by the white whale.
The gold duoblon is true to its owner: a white hump appears from the water in front of the captain himself. Three days the chase lasts, three times the whaleboats approach the whale. Having eaten Ahab’s whaleboat in two, Moby Dick lays around the captain, thrown aside, not allowing other boats to come to his rescue, until the approaching “Pecod” pushes the sperm whale from his victim. Once in the boat, Ahab again requires his harpoon kit, however, already sailing away, and we have to return to the ship. It’s getting dark, and on the “Pecoda” they lose sight of the whale. All night the whaler follows Moby Dick and at dawn he overtakes again. But, having confused the line from the harpoons stabbing him, the whale breaks two whaleboats against each other, and Ahab’s boat attacks, ducking and striking from under the water in the bottom. The ship picks up the people in distress, and it was not immediately noticed in the turmoil, that Parsa is not among them. Remembering his promise, Ahab can not hide his fear, but continues the persecution. Everything that happens here is predetermined, he says.
On the third day the boats surrounded by a shark flock again rush to the fountain seen on the horizon, a sea hawk reappears above the “Pecod” – now it carries away a torn pennant in its claws; A sailor was sent to the mast to replace it. Furious with the pain caused to him by the wounds received the day before, the whale immediately rushes to the whaleboats, and only the captain’s boat, among whose rowers Izmail is now, remains afloat. And when the boat turns sideways, the tattered corpse of Fedalla, tied to Moby Dick’s back, appears with the loops of a line turning around the giant trunk. This is the hearse first. Moby Dick is not looking for a meeting with Ahab, still trying to leave, but the captain’s whaleboat is not far behind. Then, turning to meet the “Pecoda”, who had already lifted people from the water, and having unraveled in him the source of all his persecutions, the sperm whale rams the ship. After receiving a hole, the “Pecod” begins to sink, and watching from the boat Ahab understands that in front of him – a second hearse. Already can not be saved. He sends the last harpoon to the whale. The hemp line, swirling with a loop from the sharp jerk of the whipped whale, wraps Ahab and takes him to the abyss. The whaleboat with all the oarsmen falls into a huge funnel on the site of the already sunken ship, in which everything that was once the “Pecode” hides to the last splinter. But when the waves are already closing above the head of the sailor standing on the mast, his hand rises and yet strengthens the flag. And this is the last thing seen above the water. Already can not be saved. He sends the last harpoon to the whale. The hemp line, swirling with a loop from the sharp jerk of the whipped whale, wraps Ahab and takes him to the abyss. The whaleboat with all the oarsmen falls into a huge funnel on the site of the already sunken ship, in which everything that was once the “Pecode” hides to the last splinter. But when the waves are already closing above the head of the sailor standing on the mast, his hand rises and yet strengthens the flag. And this is the last thing seen above the water. Already can not be saved. He sends the last harpoon to the whale. The hemp line, swirling with a loop from the sharp jerk of the whipped whale, wraps Ahab and takes him to the abyss. The whaleboat with all the oarsmen falls into a huge funnel on the site of the already sunken ship, in which everything that was once the “Pecode” hides to the last splinter. But when the waves are already closing above the head of the sailor standing on the mast, his hand rises and yet strengthens the flag. And this is the last thing seen above the water. But when the waves are already closing above the head of the sailor standing on the mast, his hand rises and yet strengthens the flag. And this is the last thing seen above the water. But when the waves are already closing above the head of the sailor standing on the mast, his hand rises and yet strengthens the flag. And this is the last thing seen above the water.
Dropped out of the whaleboat and left behind the stern of Ishmael, too, he drags to the funnel, but when he reaches it, it already turns into a smooth foamy whirlpool, from the depth of which suddenly bursts out onto the surface a life buoy-coffin. On this coffin, untouched by sharks, Ishmael is kept in the open sea for a day, until another’s ship selects him: that was the inconsolable “Rachel”, who, wandering in search of her missing children, found only one more orphan.
“And I only escaped to tell you…”