Nearly everyone in the Western world is familiar with the story of Moby Dick—the mighty white whale obsessively pursued by Captain Ahad across the vast oceans of the world, not for profit or part of whaling business, but merely out of an all-consuming desire for revenge. The motive: the whale, a beast simply defending itself against its predators, bit off Ahab’s leg in a previous whaling journey.
If such a premise is not sufficiently gargantuan in itself, the entire novel parodies the extravagance of the classic fable. Hyperbole abounds in the satirical and unreliable digressions on philosophy, Old Testament scripture, political science, biology, cetology, folklore, and economics. If the novel serves as a record of whaling and its significance to American culture during the 19th century, then it is an unreliable one: our narrator, who wants us to call him “Ishmael”, remains elusive and, as a result of withholding any personal details, becomes suspicious and unreliable.
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