Moby Dick Essay

Moby Dick by Herman Melville is a tale of a crew on a whaling vessel Pequod, venturing out to kill Moby Dick, a great white whale who took the leg of the ship’s Captain Ahab. Ishmael, the narrator of the story, is a junior member of the crew. Even though Ishmael does not play a major role in the novel, the narrative accounts show through his persuasive storytelling. He gives insight to the ideals and troubles whaling vessels encounter throughout their endeavors. Even though this book is full of great details about the whaling industry, there are scenes within the text that have more meaning behind them. Chapter 69 the Funeral is the most powerful scene in my eyes. After killing a whale in Chapter 61, the crew’s job was to put a hook into the blubber of the whale and peel it off the bone. After the job of “cutting-in” they lay the whale’s body to rest at sea. Ishmael seems to feel remorseful for letting this happen. He goes into detail about what

He does not reveal a lot about who he is and makes it rather difficult to figure out how one may feel about him. He is the narrator of a lot of the story, but he is over taken by a lot of monologues from other shipmates. Ishmael is an educated and experienced man. He has intelligence which makes him different than then other men on the ship. They are uneducated but without Ishmael’s intelligence the accounts of the story would not be able to comprehendible. He has this sense of suicide in which he takes the task of finding Moby Dick because he believes that anytime he feels depressed he goes to sea. So this was his perfect voyage. He was depressed and decided to take this voyage because he rather be a worker than a passenger. He would rather be paid then pay himself. He knew whaling was his fate and that he always had a curiosity about whales. Most of his motives come from Chapter 1 of the novel. “Such a pretentious and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity” (24; ch.