Moby Dick Or, The Whale

“Call me Ishmael”, from Moby-Dick, is one of the world literature’s most famous opening lines. In this outstanding work, Ishmael, the narrator, recounts the epic story of the insane quest that he becomes a part of as he boards the whale ship Pequod.It is the story of Captain Ahab, the vengeful whaler, and his pursuit of Moby Dick, the elusive white whale, who on a previous voyage destroyed his boat and left Ahab a crippled and obsessive monomaniac. The insanity and the blind need for vengeance evokes fear and doubt in his crew members as Ahab threatens to lead the ship and all its members to an adventurous, yet increasingly, precarious culmination. Will Ahab recognize his own madness before the high seas of vengeance—where Moby Dick awaits their intertwined fate—engulfs everyone? D.H. Lawrence called Moby-Dick “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world,” and “the greatest book of the sea ever written.” It stands alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as a novel that appears bizarre to the point of being unreadable but proves to be infinitely open to interpretation and discovery.