Moby Dick, or the Whale - Kostenloses Hörbuch
1/44Chapter 000: Etymology and Extracts
Moby Dick, or the Whale
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
ETYMOLOGY.
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.” —Hackluyt.
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” —Webster’s Dictionary.
“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.” —Richardson’s Dictionary.
| חו, | Hebrew. | |
| ϰητος, | Greek. | |
| CETUS, | Latin. | |
| WHŒL, | Anglo-Saxon. | |
| HVALT, | Danish. | |
| WAL, | Dutch. | |
| HWAL, | Swedish. | |
| HVALUR, | Icelandic. | |
| WHALE, | English. | |
| BALEINE, | French. | |
| BALLENA, | Spanish. | |
| PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, | Fegee. | |
| PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE, | Erromangoan. |
Zusammenfassung
Moby-Dick is a novel by the American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851, first in London as The Whale and weeks later in New York under its now familiar title. Melville drew on his own years at sea, including time aboard a whaling ship in the early 1840s. The book was poorly received in his lifetime but is now regarded as one of the central works of American literature.
The narrator, who asks to be called Ishmael, is a restless young man who signs on for a whaling voyage out of Nantucket. In New Bedford he forms an unlikely friendship with Queequeg, a harpooner from a Pacific island, and the two join the crew of the Pequod. Only after the ship is at sea does its captain, Ahab, reveal the true purpose of the voyage: to track down Moby Dick, the great white sperm whale that took off his leg on an earlier hunt. Ahab's obsession increasingly overrides the ordinary business of the ship and the doubts of his first mate, Starbuck.
The book mixes adventure with long digressions on whales, whaling, philosophy and religion, along with passages that read like stage drama. Hearing it aloud helps carry listeners through its varied styles. It suits those who enjoy sea stories, ambitious novels and questions about fate and obsession.
Über
Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel. (Summary by Stewart Wills)
Kommentare
Seien Sie der Erste, der kommentiert
Es gibt noch keine Kommentare zu diesem Inhalt. Beginnen Sie die Diskussion!
Mehr entdecken
Mehr von Herman Melville
