call me viktor. here’s the whole voyage, long as the **pequod**’s wake.
ishmael, drifting and blue, ships out of nantucket with queer cannibal harpooneer queequeg. they sign on the **pequod**, a whale-oil barque captained by the monomaniacal peg-legged ahab,hell-bent on vengeance on the white sperm-whale moby-dick that bit off his leg. starbuck, the thoughtful first mate, tries to mind profits; stubborn stubb jokes through danger; flask thirsts for kills; queequeg, tashtego, and daggoo hurl irons from the yards.
ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast,prize for first to spy the whale,chants his dark pact with the crew. along the globe’s belt he steers: christmas storms near the azores, sperm-oil fires off patagonia, calm on the line, silver sharks chasing hacked blubber. queequeg nearly dies of fever and carves his coffin; pip the cabin boy cracks under the sea’s indifference. encounters with the gloomy **jeroboam** (whose crew is haunted by a prophet), the wintry **samuel enderby**, the reckless virgin ship **rose-bud**, and the charnel **rachel** deepen dread: all have tasted the white whale’s vengeance yet sail on, broken.
ahab’s maps, his bribe-fed fedallah’s prophecy “hemp only, not thee,” the quadrant he hurls away, the log-and-line he cuts, the compass needle he browbeats,all mark the grind from reason to obsession. three days of the chase: first day the whale broaches, devil-white, rakes boats; second day he leaves ahab’s splintered ivory leg mocking; third day the sea turns red, the crew of five sail in fetid fate,the whale smashes the boats, dashes helm, flips the black hull upside down; queequeg’s coffin bobs as single life-buoy; ishmael alone clings, the orphan narrator left to tell the tale.
titanic themes ride beneath the oars: man vs. beast, god vs. void, class vs. fate, the greasy treasure commodifying blood. melville stuffs cetology, sermons, gibes at whiteness, whole acts of shakespeare into blistering prose, balancing gnostic laughter with crushing fatalism. when moby-dick breaches one last time the universe seems to whisper: observe thyself, o mortal climber of masts.
the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
