Moby Dick

MOBY DICK is far more than a story of "man hates whale, man pursues whale, whale destroys man," or of Captain Ahab's monomaniacal fixation on the great white whale, Moby Dick, MOBY DICK is a tremendously ambitious novel that functions at once as a documentary of life at sea and a vast philosophical allegory of life in general. No sacred subject is spared in this bleak and scathing critique of the known world, as Melville satirizes by turns religious traditions, moral values, and the literary and political figures of the day. Yet the book is hardly abstract; it delineates memorable characters such as Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, and Ahab, and has passages of action as riveting as THE PERFECT STORM. Melville's work is an enduring classic.