Resumen

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.

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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)