Audiobook · read by volunteers
Moby Dick, or the Whale
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
Read by Stewart Wills · 44 chapters · 24 h 37
About the book
Call me Ishmael. With those words begins one of the strangest, grandest and most daring novels in the English language. Ishmael, a restless young man, signs on to a whaling ship, the Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab, who is driven by a single obsession: to find and destroy the great white whale that took his leg.
On the surface, this is a sea adventure, full of storms, chases and sudden danger. But Melville fills his pages with much more. There are chapters on the habits of whales, the work of the whalers, the nature of ships and crews, and long meditations on fate, evil and the limits of human knowledge. The book mixes comedy, scripture, drama and science in a way few had tried before.
Forty-four sections, gathering the book’s 135 chapters, and nearly twenty-five hours, in a recording by a LibriVox volunteer. It is a major listening commitment, and a major reward. Let the sea carry you through it, and discover why many readers consider it the greatest American novel.
Introduction
Herman Melville (1819-1891) published Moby-Dick in 1851, after several years at sea in his youth, including time on a whaling ship. The book drew on that experience, as well as on his reading in natural history and the Bible. It was dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Melville had befriended while writing it.
The novel was not a success in its time. Readers who expected another adventure story, like his earlier books Typee and Omoo, found a work that seemed digressive and difficult, and Melville’s reputation declined. Only in the early twentieth century, long after his death, did critics begin to recognise it as a masterpiece. It is now regarded as one of the central texts of American literature, and its opening line is among the best known in fiction.
Part of what makes the book so unusual is its variety. Narrative chapters alternate with essays on whale anatomy, whaling technology and the history of whale depictions, and with passages written in the form of a play. These shifts, which can surprise a new reader, are central to the book’s design. They build a picture of a whole world, and of the vast and mysterious nature that Ahab refuses to accept.
This recording has forty-four sections, each gathering one or more of the book’s 135 chapters, and runs for around twenty-five hours, read by a LibriVox volunteer. Listening is a particularly good way to experience Melville’s rhythmic, Biblical prose. Give it time, and it will repay you with one of the great literary journeys.
Public domain
Herman Melville died in 1891: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text