'Command the murderous chalices!...Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow - Death to Moby Dick!'. So Captain Ahab binds his crew to fulfil his obsession - the destruction of the great white whale. Under his lordly but maniacal command the Pequod's commercial mission is perverted to one of vengeance. To Ahab, the monster that destroyed his body is not a creature, but the symbol of 'some unknown but still reasoning thing'. Uncowed by natural disasters, ill omens, even death, Ahab urges his ship towards 'the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale'.
As a revelation of human destiny it is too deep even for sorrow, was how D.H. Lawrence characterized MOBY-DICK. Published in the same five-year span as The Scarlet Letter, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, this great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul is the ultimate achievement of that stunning period in American letters.
"Responsive to the shaping forces of his age as only men of passionate imagination are, even Melville can hardly have been fully aware of how symbolical an American hero he had fashioned in Ahab."
--F. O. Matthiessen
Everyman's Library Classics hardcover: 1.38" H x 8.31" L x 5.26" W, 632 pages
Penguin Classics Deluxe paperback: 1.73" H x 8.58" L x 5.42" W, 624 pages