Moby Dick

Moby Dick is a novel by writer Herman Melville published in 1851. It recounts the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab, along with Ishmael and the harpooner Queequeg in the obsessive and self-destructive pursuit of a great white sperm whale.

Apart from the persecution and evolution of its characters, the theme of the novel is eminently encyclopedic as it includes detailed and extensive descriptions of whaling in the 19th century and a multitude of other details about marine life at the time. Perhaps for this reason the novel did not have any commercial success in its first publication, although it has subsequently served to cement the author's reputation and place him among the best American writers.

The book begins with 80 epigraphs, beginning with one from Genesis and ending with a whaling song. All the epigraphs are related to the sea and the whales or the leviathan. Melville also presents direct dictionary definitions for whale first and then a table showing the word whale in different languages.

The opening phrase of the narrator —«Call me Ishmael» in English, sometimes translated into Spanish as «Call me Ishmael», other times as «You can call me Ishmael»—has become one of the best-known quotes in English-language literature.

Plot

The narrator, Ishmael, is a young American with experience in the merchant marine, who decides that his next voyage will be on a whaling ship. In the same way, he is convinced that his journey must begin in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a prestigious island during the 19th century for its whaling industry. Before reaching his destiny, or the origin of his adventure, Ishmael strikes up a close friendship with the experienced Polynesian harpooner Queequeg , with whom he agrees to share the company.

Both enlist on the whaler Pequod, with a crew made up of sailors of the most diverse nationalities and races; His harpooners are precisely Queequeg, the red man Tashtego and the "black savage" Daggoo. The Pequod is led by the mysterious, violent, and authoritarian Captain Ahab, an old and highly respected sea dog, with decades of experience in seafaring life, and above all with a leg carved from the jaw of a sperm whale. The irascible Ahab will reveal to his crew that the main objective of the trip, beyond whaling in general, is the tenacious pursuit of the white whale Moby Dick, the enormous leviathan that deprived him of his leg. years ago, when this monstrous cetacean had gained a reputation for wreaking havoc on any and all whalers who had daringly or recklessly tried to hunt it down.

As time passes, Ahab becomes increasingly obsessed with the capture of Moby Dick, belittling the dangers of whaling, and constantly putting the lives of the crew at risk on a journey across many oceans. The sailors, as fascinated by Moby Dick as they are fearful of Ahab's wrath, follow their captain without hesitation or qualms, until a terrible and epic ending presided over with another biblical epigraph, this time taken from the Book of Job.

Structure

Point of view

Ishmael is the storyteller, shaping his story with the use of many different genres, including sermons, plays, soliloquies, and signature readings. Ishmael repeatedly refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim and random way, I must explain myself, otherwise all these chapters might be nothing' Scholar John Bryant calls it the 'central consciousness and narrative voice of the novel. & # 34; Walter Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as a narrator from Ishmael as a character, whom he calls "Ishmael the forecaster", the younger Ishmael of a few years ago. The narrator Ishmael, then, is "simply the young Ishmael aged" A second distinction avoids the confusion of either Ishmael with the author Herman Melville. Bezanson cautions readers to "resist any one-on-one equating of Melville and Ishmael".

Structure of the chapters

According to critic Walter Bezanson, chapter structure can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter groups" and "equilibrium chapters". The simplest sequences are those of narrative progression, then thematic sequences, such as the three chapters on the painting of whales, and sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Midships" 3. 4; or the four chapters that begin with "The candles". The chapter groups are the chapters on the meaning of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire. The balance chapters are the opposites chapters, like "Los telares" in front of the "Epilogue", or the similar ones, such as "The fourth deck" and "The candles".

Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters as structured around three patterns: first, the nine encounters of the Pequod with the ships that have encountered Moby Dick. Each of them has suffered increasingly severe damage, foreshadowing the Pequod's own fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with the whales. In the first encounters, the whalers barely make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive gathering of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Great Armada". A typhoon near Japan sets the stage for Ahab's showdown with Moby Dick.

The third pattern is cetologic documentation, so prodigal that it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters begin with the ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of whaling, closing in with secondhand accounts of the wickedness of whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically ordered commentary on whale photographs.. The climax of this section is chapter 57, "Of Whales in Painting, etc.", which begins with the lowly (a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus the other half of this pattern, begins with the first description of living whales in the book, and then the anatomy of the sperm whale is covered, more or less from front to back. and from the outer to the inner parts, until reaching the skeleton. In two final chapters, the evolution of the whale as a species is exposed and its eternal character is claimed.

About "ten or more" Most of the chapters on the killing of whales, from two-fifths of the book onwards, develop sufficiently to be called 'events'. As Bezanson writes, "in each case, a massacre provokes a sequence of chapters or a group of chapters of the ketological tradition that arises from the circumstance of the particular massacre", so these massacres are "structural occasions to order essays and sermons on whaling".

Buell notes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of the observer/hero bipolar narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who intertwine and contrast with each other, with Ishmael being the observer and narrator. As an Ishmael story, notes Robert Milder, it is an "educational narrative".

Bryant and Springer see the book as structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as the force of linearity and Ishmael as the force of digression. Although both have a sense of orphanhood, they try to resolve this hole in their beings in different ways: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot of Moby-Dick may be driven by Ahab's wrath, Ishmael's desire to seize the "ungraspable" explains the novel's lyricism. Buell sees a double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is to "understand what to do with both the whale and the hunt".

One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travelogue, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry. He qualifies Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre as "a Nabokovian twist" #34;.

Nine encounters with other ships

A significant structural resource is the series of nine encounters (gams) between the Pequod and other ships. These meetings are important for three reasons. First of all, because of its location in the narrative. The first two meetings and the last two are close to each other. The core group of five encounters is separated by about 12 chapters, give or take. This pattern provides a structural element, Bezanson notes, as if the encounters were "the bones of the book's meat." Second, the development of Ahab's responses to the encounters traces the "upward curve of his passion"; and of his monomania. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the meaning of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll that the narrator unrolls and reads".

Bezanson sees no single way to explain the significance of all these ships. Instead, they can be interpreted as "a set of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues, a masquerade of the situation facing man, a parade of the humors within men, a parade of nations.", etc., as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale".

Researcher Nathalia Wright sees the encounters and the meaning of the boats in a different way. She highlights the four ships that have already encountered Moby Dick. The first, the Jeroboam, is named after the predecessor of the biblical king Ahab. His destiny & # 34; prophetic & # 34; is "a message of warning to all who follow him, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel Enderby, the Rachel, the Delight i> and, lastly, the Pequod". None of the other ships have been completely destroyed because none of their captains shared Ahab's monomania; The fate of Jeroboam reinforces the structural parallelism between Ahab and his Biblical namesake: "Ahab did more to provoke the wrath of the Lord God of Israel than all the kings of Israel did to him." preceded & # 34; (I Kings 16:33).

Interpretations

Moby Dick is a work of profound symbolism. It is usually considered that it shares characteristics of allegory and epic. It includes references to topics as diverse as biology, idealism, hierarchy, obsession, politics, pragmatism, racism, religion, and revenge.

The crew of the Pequod have origins as varied as Chile, Colombia, China, Denmark, Spain, France, Holland, India, England, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Tahiti, making it which suggests that the Pequod is a representation of humanity.

Biblical allusions to character names or the meaning of the white sperm whale have intrigued readers and critics for more than a century.

Inspiration from real events

Illustration by Moby Dick, in an edition of the 1892 novel.

In addition to being based on Melville's personal experiences as a sailor, Moby Dick is inspired by two real cases:

• The epic suffered by the Essex whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, when he was attacked by a cachalote in 1820.
  After sunk by the cetaceous, the crew wandered across the Pacific Ocean to Henderson Island. 91 days later, they were rescued and disembarked in Valparaiso (Chile). George Pollard Jr. and Owen Chase, two of the eight survivors, reported the event.
• The case of an albino cachalote that merode the island Mocha (Chile) in 1839, to which they called “Mocha Dick” in the nineteenth century.
  The account of this case was published in 1839 by the New York magazine Knickerbocker. Written by an officer of the U.S. Navy, narrates the actual battle of balleneros with an albino cetaceous known as Mocha Dick near Mocha Island, in Tirúa (Chile). Like Moby Dick, the albino cachalote escaped countless times from his hunters for more than forty years, so he had several harpoons embedded in his back. The whalers told that he was furiously attacking by resurfaces that formed a cloud around him; he smothered the ships by perforating them and volcanoing them, killing the sailors who dared to confront him. According to the storyteller of the article published in the magazine, in order to kill Mocha Dick the union of different whale ships of different nationalities was required.
  It should be noted that in Chile, in the Mapuche indigenous culture, there is the myth of the TrempulcahueFour whales carrying the souls of the dead Mapuches to Mocha Island to embark on their final journey. On the coast of Chile in 2005, several of these albino cachalotes were filmed.

Accommodations

• In 1926 a silent film was made, The Sea Beast (The marine beaststarring John Barrymore.
• In 1930 another version was shot with the same title and Barrymore again.
• Between 1937 and 1938 the composer of soundtracks Bernard Hermann composed a song called Moby Dick, for 2 tenors, 2 bass and orchestra, premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1940 by John Barbirolli.
• In 1962 the animated series Tom and Jerry released an episode inspired by the novel: "Dicky Moe".
• In 1956 it was filmed Moby DickJohn Huston, with Gregory Peck on Captain Ahab's role, with a script by American writer Ray Bradbury.
• In 1967 Hanna-Barbera created an animated series called Moby-Dick and Mighty MightorIn which, Moby-Dick helps two children (Tom and Tub) and his pet Scooby (a sea lion) face the dangers of the underwater world.
• In the West End from New York, the musical was represented Moby Dick!based on a school production of the novel.
• In 1992 Vittorio Gassman premiered Ulysses and the white whalea theatrical assembly based on the translation of the novel by Cesare Pavese.
• In 1998, a television film was produced by Patrick Stewart.
• In 2003 and 2007, French filmmaker Philippe Ramos made a personal adaptation of the novel in a short (2003) and a film (2007), called Captain Achab (Captain Ahab). The film is a drama that tells the story of the protagonist in several chapters narrated by characters who met him, until he concluded with his encounter with the whale.
• In the child series The Three MellizasA chapter is dedicated to the book.
• In Nickelodeon's animated series The Fairly OddParents, reference is made to the novel in the episode "The books are alive".
• In the independent production Moby Dick (2010 film) some plots of the original argument were changed.
• In 2011 premiere Age of the Dragons, a film whose argument is an adaptation of the novel to a world of fantasy with dragons. In this budget movie Danny Glover plays Captain Ahab.
• In 2011 premiere Moby Dick, a television mini-series starring William Hurt as Captain Ahab, Ethan Hawke as Starbuck and Charlie Cox as Ishmael. The mini-series consists of two 90-minute chapters each.
• In 2015 it was filmed In the Heart of the Sea, which was directed by Ron Howard and starring Chris Hemsworth.
• In 2018 the play was premiered Moby Dick, directed by Andrés Lima and starring José María Pou.
• In October 2022 it was premiered at the Auditorium 400 of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Moby Dick, stage radiodrama for actors, flute, violin, cello, piano, percussion and electronics from the work of Herman Melville, with music composed by Iñaki Estrada Torío and libretto by José Miguel Baena. The writer himself acted as a narrator, along with the Ciklus Ensemble (directed by Asier Puga). The work included an electronic part by the RCSM Sonology Department and a text recording, which was commissioned by the White Whale Theatre Company.