Moby Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics)

by HermanMelville (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $6.79

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $7.05

  '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'.

• New

  paperback
  

  $8.44

  With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'. Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his 'mighty theme' - not only the whale but all things sublime - Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $18.71

  A story of the war between man and mammal, in which the author explores his obsessions with good and evil, love and solitude, speech and silence, using his technical knowledge of sailing and the sea to tell a story which is at once minutely realistic and powerfully symbolic.