By: Didimus
Estanto T.
Book Report Assignment
MOBY DICK
A novel by Herman Melville
·
Summery
Ishmael, the narrator, announces
his intent to ship aboard a whaling vessel. He has made several voyages as a
sailor but none as a whaler. He travels to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he
stays in a whalers’ inn. Since the inn is rather full, he has to share a bed
with a harpooner from the South Pacific named Queequeg. At first repulsed by
Queequeg’s strange habits and shocking, Ishmael eventually comes to appreciate
the man’s generosity and kind spirit, and the two decide to seek work on a
whaling vessel together. They take a ferry to Nantucket, the traditional
capital of the whaling industry. There they secure berths on the Pequod, a
savage-looking ship adorned with the bones and teeth of sperm whales. Peleg and
Bildad, the Pequod’s Quaker owners, drive a hard bargain in terms of salary.
They also mention the ship’s mysterious captain, Ahab, who is still recovering
from losing his leg in an encounter with a sperm whale on his last voyage.
The
Pequod leaves Nantucket on a cold Christmas Day with a crew made up of men from
many different countries and races. Soon the ship is in warmer waters, and Ahab
makes his first appearance on deck, balancing gingerly on his false leg, which
is made from a sperm whale’s jaw. He announces his desire to pursue and kill Moby
Dick, the legendary great white whale who took his leg, because he sees this
whale as the embodiment of evil. Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast and
declares that it will be the prize for the first man to sight the whale. As the
Pequod sails toward the Southern tip of Africa, whales are sighted and
unsuccessfully hunted. During the hunt, a group of men, none of whom anyone on
the ship’s crew has seen before on the voyage, emerges from the hold. The men’s
leader is an exotic-looking man named Fedallah. These men constitute Ahab’s
private harpoon crew, smuggled aboard in defiance of Bildad and Peleg. Ahab
hopes that their skills and Fedallah’s prophetic abilities will help him in his
hunt for Moby Dick.
The Pequod rounds Africa and
enters the Indian Ocean. A few whales are successfully caught and processed for
their oil. From time to time, the ship encounters other whaling vessels. Ahab
always demands information about Moby Dick from their captains. One of the
ships, the Jeroboam, carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom for
anyone who threatens Moby Dick. His predictions seem to carry some weight, as
those aboard his ship who have hunted the whale have met disaster. While trying
to drain the oil from the head of a captured sperm whale, Tashtego, one of the
Pequod’s harpooners, falls into the whale’s voluminous head, which then rips
free of the ship and begins to sink. Queequeg saves Tashtego by diving into the
ocean and cutting into the slowly sinking head.
During
another whale hunt, Pip, the Pequod’s black cabin boy, jumps from a whaleboat
and is left behind in the middle of the ocean. He goes insane as the result of
the experience and becomes a crazy but prophetic jester for the ship. Soon
after, the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby, a whaling ship whose skipper,
Captain Boomer, has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick. The two
captains discuss the whale; Boomer, happy simply to have survived his
encounter, cannot understand Ahab’s lust for vengeance. Not long after,
Queequeg falls ill and has the ship’s carpenter make him a coffin in
anticipation of his death. He recovers, however, and the coffin eventually
becomes the Pequod’s replacement life buoy.
Ahab
orders a harpoon forged in the expectation that he will soon encounter Moby
Dick. He baptizes the harpoon with the blood of the Pequod’s three harpooners.
The Pequod kills several more whales. Issuing a prophecy about Ahab’s death,
Fedallah declares that Ahab will first see two hearses, the second of which
will be made only from American wood, and that he will be killed by hemp rope.
Ahab interprets these words to mean that he will not die at sea, where there
are no hearses and no hangings. A typhoon hits the Pequod, illuminating it with
electrical fire. Ahab takes this occurrence as a sign of imminent confrontation
and success, but Starbuck, the ship’s first mate, takes it as a bad omen and
considers killing Ahab to end the mad quest. After the storm ends, one of the
sailors falls from the ship’s masthead and drowns—a grim foreshadowing of what
lies ahead.
Ahab’s
fervent desire to find and destroy Moby Dick continues to intensify, and the
mad Pip is now his constant companion. The Pequod approaches the equator, where
Ahab expects to find the great whale. The ship encounters two more whaling
ships, the Rachel and the Delight, both of which have recently had fatal
encounters with the whale. Ahab finally sights Moby Dick. The harpoon boats are
launched, and Moby Dick attacks Ahab’s harpoon boat, destroying it. The next
day, Moby Dick is sighted again, and the boats are lowered once more. The whale
is harpooned, but Moby Dick again attacks Ahab’s boat. Fedallah, trapped in the
harpoon line, is dragged overboard to his death. Starbuck must maneuver the
Pequod between Ahab and the angry whale.
On the third day, the boats are
once again sent after Moby Dick, who once again attacks them. The men can see
Fedallah’s corpse lashed to the whale by the harpoon line. Moby Dick rams the
Pequod and sinks it. Ahab is then caught in a harpoon line and hurled out of
his harpoon boat to his death. All of the remaining whaleboats and men are
caught in the vortex created by the sinking Pequod and pulled under to their
deaths. Ishmael, who was thrown from a boat at the beginning of the chase, was
far enough away to escape the whirlpool, and he alone survives. He floats atop
Queequeg’s coffin, which popped back up from the wreck, until he is picked up
by the Rachel, which is still searching for the crewmen lost in her earlier
encounter with Moby Dick.
·
Character Of The Novel
Captain Ahab
Ahab is the Captain of the Pequod, a grave
older man reaching his sixties who has spent nearly forty years as a sailor,
only three of which he has spent on dry land. The novel is essentially the
story of Ahab and his quest to defeat the legendary Sperm Whale Moby Dick, for
this whale took Ahab's leg, causing him to use an ivory leg to walk and stand.
Ahab is a dour, imposing man who frightens his crew through his unwavering
obsession with defeating Moby Dick and his grand hubris. In many respects
Melville portrays Ahab as barely human, barely governed by human mores and
conventions and nearly entirely subject to his own obsession with Moby Dick. He
is in some ways a machine, unaffected by human appetites and without
recognizable emotion. And most importantly, he claims himself a God over the
Pequod, but instead he may be a Satanic figure through his somewhat blasphemous
quest against the white whale.
Ishmael
Ishmael is the narrator of the novel, a simple
sailor on the Pequod who undertakes the journey because of his affection for
the ocean and his need to go sea whenever he feels "hazy about the
eyes." As the narrator Ishmael establishes him as somewhat of a cipher and
an everyman, and in fact his role in the plot of the novel is inconsequential;
his primary task is to observe the conflicts around him. Nevertheless, Melville
does give his narrator several significant character traits, the most important
of which is his idealization of the Sperm Whale and his belief in its majesty.
Also, it is Ishmael who has the only significant personal relationship in the
novel; he becomes a close friend with the pagan harpooner Queequeg and comes to
cherish and adore Queequeg to a somewhat improbable level open to great
interpretation; Melville even describes their relationship in terms of a
marriage. Ishmael is the only survivor of the Pequod's voyage, living to tell
the tale of Moby Dick only because he is by chance on a whaling boat when Moby
Dick sinks the Pequod and is rescued by a nearby ship.
Starbuck
Starbuck is the chief mate of the Pequod, a
Nantucket native and a Quaker with a thin build and a pragmatic manner. In
appearance, Starbuck is quite thin and seems condensed into his most essential
characteristics, and his streamlined appearance well suits his attitudes and
behavior.
Queequeg
Queequeg is a harpooner.Ishmael meets Queequeg
when the two must share a bed at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford before
journeying to Nantucket to undertake the journey on the Pequod. Melville
portrays Queequeg as a blend of civilized behavior and savagery. Certainly in
his appearance and upbringing he is uncivilized by the standards of the main
characters of the novel, yet Melville, through his narrator Ishmael, finds
Queequeg to be incredibly noble, courteous and brave. Melville uses Queequeg as
a character in perpetual transition: from savagery to civilization, and in the
final chapters after he suffers from an illness from which he wills himself
recovered, in an uneasy stasis between life and death. The relationship between
Queequeg and Ishmael is the most intimate of the novel, as the two become close
companions.
Stubb
The second mate on the Pequod, Stubb is a Cape
Cod native with a happy-go-lucky, carefree nature that tends to mask his true
opinions and beliefs. Stubb remains comical even in the face of the imperious
Ahab, and he even dares to make a joke at the captain's expense. Although never
serious, Stubb is nevertheless a more than competent whaleman: his easygoing
manner allows Stubb to prompt his crew to work without seeming imposing or
dictatorial, and it is Stubb who kills the first whale on the Pequod's voyage.
Flask
The third mate on the ship, Flask plays a much
less prominent role than either Starbuck or Stubb. He is a native of Martha's
Vineyard with a pugnacious attitude concerning whales. Melville portrays Stubb
as a man whose appetites cannot be sated, and in fact in attempting to sate
these appetites Flask becomes even more hungry.
Fedallah
He is one of the "dusky phantoms"
that compose Ahab's special whaling crew. The Asiatic and Oriental Fedallah,
also called the Parsee, remains represents a sinister figure for the crew of
the Pequod; there are even rumors that he is the devil in disguise and wishes
to kidnap Ahab. Fedallah has a prophetic dream of hearses twice during the
course of the novel, yet both he and Ahab conceive that this means a certain
end to Moby Dick. Fedallah dies during the second day of the chase against Moby
Dick, when he becomes entangled in the whale line.
Another characters:
Peter Coffin, Pippin, Father Mapple, Hosea Hussey, Peleg, Bildad,
Elijah, Bulkington, Tashtego, Daggoo, Dough-Boy, Perth, Captain Mayhew,
Gabriel, Macey , Derick De Deer, Dr. Bunger, Captain Gardiner.
·
Setting
Place : Cape Horn,
Pacific Ocean, New Bedford,
Nantucket, equator, Massachusetts,
South Pacific, Southern tip of
Africa, Indian Ocean, deck.
Time : Monday,
Saturday, two days of walking, four-five years at sea, third day, Christmas
Day, the day after, after three month.
·
Theme
The
best theme for this novel I think is “ revenge is the wrong enthusiasm to get
something”
Postingan
