Moby Dick

Moby Dick is an exceptional and extraordinary work of world literature, occupying in American culture approximately the same place as the great national poems, from Homer to Milton, have in other, older literatures. The author began Moby Dick with the intention of writing an adventurous and maritime narrative in which autobiographical information would be suppressed by an imaginative, partly comical depiction of the fate of the narrator Ishmael (the namesake of the biblical disinherited outcast) and his friend, the brave, good-natured Que equeg from the Polynesian islands. They are at the center of all events until chapter 22, and from that chapter the character of the book changes...