Moby Dick (Wordsworth Classics)

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd
Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of Poetry Review.

Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. The quest is an obsession, and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab’s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work:

• All hands dependent on all hands
• Each individual responsible for the security of each

Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel’s narrator. He is an ordinary sailor and an extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent — the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:

• In the practice of whaling
• In the art of writing

Expanding to equal his ‘mighty theme’ — not only the whale but all things sublime — Melville breathes in the world’s great literature.

Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.