Moby-Dick Summary | Chapterly

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: A Complete Summary "Call me Ishmael." Overview Moby-Dick (1851) opens with one of the most famous sentences in literature and unfolds into the most ambitious American novel of the nineteenth century. On the surface, it is the story of a whaling voyage and one captain's obsessive hunt for a white whale. Beneath, it is a meditation on obsession, the limits of knowledge, the nature of evil, humanity's relationship with nature, and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of existence. The novel was a commercial failure in Melville's lifetime. He died in obscurity. It was rediscovered in the 1920s and is now recognized as a towering masterpiece—dense, digressive, brilliant, and unlike anything written before or since. Plot Summary Ishmael, a restless young man, signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod in Nantucket. He befriends Queequeg, a tattooed South Pacific islander and harpooner. The ship's captain, Ahab, has lost his leg to a great white sperm whale called Moby Dick and has devoted his life to killing it. Ahab's obsession consumes the voyage. He nails a gold doubloon to the mast as reward for the first man to sight Moby Dick. The crew is drawn into his quest, though first mate...