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    Study Guide to Moby Dick by Herman Melville
    Study Guide to Moby Dick by Herman Melville
    Study Guide to Moby Dick by Herman Melville
    Ebook184 pages2 hours

    Study Guide to Moby Dick by Herman Melville

    By Intelligent Education

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    About this ebook

    A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, deemed by author Raymond Weaver as “indisputably the greatest whaling novel.”

    As an 1851 tragic epic, Moby Dick tells the story of a captain’s expedition to track down and seek revenge on a whale fro

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInfluence Publishers
    Release dateFeb 11, 2020
    ISBN9781645422099
    Study Guide to Moby Dick by Herman Melville
    Author

    Intelligent Education

    Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

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      Study Guide to Moby Dick by Herman Melville - Intelligent Education

      INTRODUCTION TO HERMAN MELVILLE

      MELVILLE’S LIFE

      (1819-1891) Born into a family of substantial means in New York City on August 19, 1819, Herman Melville spent a secure and comfortable childhood. His maternal grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, had served as a general in the American Revolution, and his father, Allan Melvill (his father’s spelling for the family name) was a successful importer. In 1830, however, his father suffered heavy financial reverses which were followed by serious illness culminating in his death in 1832.

      Shocked by the death of his father whom he idolized, Melville moved with his family to Albany where he attended the Albany Classical School for a time. Here, constant friction with his mother, and his own restlessness soon brought an end to his spotty education, supplemented only by his avid reading of the books from his father’s library.

      Melville soon drifted into a variety of occupations. He worked for a time as a clerk in a store owned by an older brother, as a messenger for a bank, and later, as a country schoolteacher near his uncle’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Finally in 1839, he signed on a British merchant ship, the St. Lawrence, bound to Liverpool and back, a trip which provided the material for his novel, Redburn (1849), and the impetus for an extended period of travel and adventure. Although he again tried school teaching on his return from Liverpool, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet as an ordinary seaman in 1841.

      After a trip around Cape Horn, Melville suffered the hardship of life aboard a mid-nineteenth century whaler until he could no longer tolerate it. Accordingly, he and a shipmate Tobias Greene (who appears as Toby in Typee) deserted the St. Lawrence at Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands. Here Merville spent a month as the captive of a cannibal tribe, and finally escaped aboard the Australian whaler the Lucy Ann, which he left a short time later at Tahiti. Again after a short stay working at a variety of occupations, he signed aboard the whaler Charles and Henry, and arrived in Hawaii in April, 1843. Here, after working for a short time as a warehouse clerk, by now homesick for America, he joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the frigate United States. Fourteen months later, after visits to Mexico and South America, he was finally discharged in New York City in October, 1844, and with the exception of a few trips later in his life, he closed forever the period of his adventures.

      In the years immediately following his travels, Melville began his career as a writer. In 1846 he published Typee, a somewhat exaggerated and imaginative account of his stay among the Typee islanders, and in 1847, its sequel Omoo. These were followed by Mardi, in 1849, an allegorical novel quite different from its predecessors and the precursor of Moby Dick. Attempting to atone for the failure of Mardi, Melville returned to the method of his earlier adventure books with Redburn (1849), which borrowed material from his first voyage to Liverpool in 1839; and White Jacket (1850), which enlarged upon his experience as a seaman aboard the United States.

      Although his first five books had won him considerable fame and some small measure of financial security, Melville still felt dissatisfied with his work, and in 1851 he published Moby Dick, which although a failure in its day, has proved in the twentieth century to be his most famous work.

      It was also during these first few years at home following his travels that Melville became established as an important member of the New York literary group, and became a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose encouragement was of immeasurable aid in the writing of Moby Dick. So much so in fact that Melville dedicated the book to him with the following inscription: In token of my admiration for his genius this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

      In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and had in the fall of that year moved from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to New York City. Later, early in 1850, after a brief trip to London to make arrangements for the publication of White Jacket, he moved to Arrowhead, a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts where he was to remain for the next thirteen years.

      Unfortunately for Melville the critical reaction to Moby Dick was negative, and the reaction to Pierre (1852), a somewhat confused and melodramatic novel which attacked, among other things, conventional morality and publishing practices, was even worse. Disturbed by his waning popularity and in ill health, Melville turned for a time to writing articles and short stories for the magazines Putnam’s and Harper’s. Among his works in this period are Israel Potter (1855), which had been first published serially, and Piazza Tales (1856), a collection of short stories which included the now famous Bartelby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno. In 1857, he published the last novel in his lifetime, The Confidence Man, a satiric tale which has its setting on a Mississippi River steamboat, and which like Moby Dick has aroused much recent critical interest.

      His career now at its lowest ebb, ill and in debt, Melville traveled through the Mediterranean countries and the Holy Land on borrowed money, and on his return attempted to make his living lecturing on such subjects as statuary in Rome and the South Seas. Unsuccessful, he sold his farm at Pittsfield, paid his debts with the remaining money, and bought a house in New York City where he secured a job in the Custom House which he held until his retirement in 1885.

      During these years and those which followed, Melville published several volumes of poetry, including: Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Clarel: a Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891). These last three volumes were for the most part privately printed in small editions at the expense of an uncle, Peter Gansevoort.

      At his death on September 28, 1891, Melville left in manuscript a considerable number of verses as well as the short novel, Billy Budd, which was not published until 1924. It has since proved one of his most interesting works, for in addition to accelerating an already reviving interest in Melville, it has achieved much critical acclaim.

      MOBY DICK

      BRIEF SUMMARY OF MOBY DICK

      Moby Dick is told to us by a man who identifies himself only as Ishmael. Impelled by an urge to see more of the world and understand more of its mysteries, Ishmael decides to go to sea. He leaves New York and travels to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he spends a night with a South Seas cannibal named Queequeg as a roommate. At first frightened by Queequeg, Ishmael soon finds him likeable enough.

      While at New Bedford, Ishmael goes to a famous whaleman’s chapel whose pastor, Father Mapple, is widely known in the whaling fleet. Father Mapple preaches a sermon which focuses on the story of Jonah and the whale, in which he emphasizes that man must reject his own pride and be true to God, letting no other force guide him. Ishmael and Queequeg become fast friends at New Bedford, and decide to go to Nantucket Island and sign on the same whaleship together. They take a packet boat, and on the trip to Nantucket, Queequeg saves an obnoxious lout from drowning in the icy waters. (This is the first of a number of scenes in which men are saved from drowning.) At Nantucket, Queequeg tells Ishmael that his god has decided that Ishmael must choose the ship on which they will sail, and Ishmael chooses the Pequod because it is so picturesque. Both men sign on, and are told that the ship’s captain is Ahab, an unusual man but one who has his humanities. He is confined at his home because of some mysterious sickness, so Ishmael cannot see him. As Ishmael and Queequeg leave the ship they are accosted by a queer old man who drops dark hints about Ahab.

      The ship sails on a cold, gray Christmas day. As the two men approach the Pequod, they see a group of shadowy figures board the ship before them. The ship plunges out into the Atlantic and for many days nothing is seen of Ahab. Ishmael presents the three mates, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, then the harpooners, and then describes the crew in general. The ship sails down the Atlantic into a warmer climate, and Ahab finally makes an appearance. As time passes, Ahab appears more frequently, usually standing in one of two holes drilled on the quarter-deck for his peg leg of whalebone. A scene between Ahab and the second mate, Stubb, shows that something is disturbing Ahab profoundly.

      Ishmael tells us something of whales, categorizing them according to size and type, and showing why he considers the sperm whale the noblest of all. He also begins to give us what proves ultimately to be an immense amount of information about whales, whaling, whaleships, and whalemen. Then comes the first big scene of the book-Ahab calls all the crew onto the quarter-deck, and tells them that he has sworn to hunt to the death the great whale, Moby Dick, that ripped his leg off on his last voyage. He inflames the crew so that except for Starbuck, the first mate, they are all eager to pursue Moby Dick; and he nails a gold doubloon to the mainmast, promising it as a reward for the first man to sight Moby Dick on the voyage.

      Ishmael sets himself to find out as much as he can about this whale, and discovers that, besides being unusually large and deformed in certain ways, Moby Dick has a savage temper which has led him to destroy many a whaleboat and kill a number of seamen. He is so ferocious that he seems, unlike ordinary whales, to know what he is doing, and to destroy boats and men with conscious malice. Most frightening of his characteristics, however, is his whiteness, which is mysterious.

      As the Pequod moves down the South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean, Ahab spends night after night with his charts and maps, tracing on them courses on which he might stand the best chance of meeting Moby Dick. Ishmael continues to fill us in on details of whales and whaling. Several times whales are sighted and chased; at the first lowering it is discovered that Ahab has a special boat crew, led by a Satanic Oriental named Fedallah - this stowaway boat crew explains the mysterious figures Ishmael saw when boarding the ship. The Pequod also meets or has significant contact with nine other vessels in the course of the voyage (the Goney, Town-Ho, Jeroboam, Jungfrau, Bouton-de-rose, Samuel Enderby, Bachelor, Rachel, and Delight). Each one of these ships, by contrast or parallel to the Pequod, gives us new information or a slightly different attitude toward Ahab’s ship and his quest. And along with all this, we get Ishmael’s constant reflections as the philosophical narrator continually examines his experiences and tries to fathom what they mean and where they are leading.

      As the Pequod sails across the Pacific, Ahab becomes ever more intense in his desire to destroy Moby Dick. He asks each one of the ships he encounters, Hast seen the White Whale? but it is only when he sails the ship down to the equator that he finally meets a ship which has seen Moby Dick. In the meantime, Pip, a little Negro youth, has been temporarily abandoned in the sea, and has lost his mind before being saved by the ship. Touched by Pip’s plight, Ahab has taken special care of him, keeping him in his cabin. Pip begs Ahab several times to abandon his quest for the White Whale, but Ahab, though deeply moved, continues the search.

      The suspense of the hunt builds throughout several weeks. The ship meets the Samuel Enderby, whose captain has recently lost his arm to Moby Dick. Ahab cracks his ivory leg leaving the Enderby, and must have a new one made by the ship’s carpenter. The Pequod runs into a typhoon, during which the mastheads glow with a mysterious electrical fire. In a weird ritual, Ahab claims to be a son of the fire and lightning, and challenges nature to do its worst to him. Finally the ship meets two whalers, the Rachel and the Delight, which have just had battles with Moby Dick. Despite dire warnings, Ahab presses the chase furiously, and the tension mounts. One last quiet day dawns; Starbuck tries his utmost to convince Ahab that the quest is folly, but Ahab feels that his acts have been foreordained since eternity, and cannot turn back. On the following day Ahab himself sights Moby Dick, thus (ironically) gaining his own promised reward.

      The first day the boats approach Moby Dick, but he dives and, coming up under Ahab’s boat, bites it in half. The Pequod sails up, drives the whale off, and picks up all its boats; then the ship follows the whale. On the second day, all three whaleboats get harpoons into Moby Dick, but he fights furiously; two boats are smashed and Ahab’s is

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