Biblioscope

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, also known, albeit less famously, as The Whale, is among the most celebrated and influential works in the history of American and world literature. The novel is a complex treatise on the limitlessness of human obsession and the tragic futility thereof, as also an allegorical commentary on colonial expansionism and in turn, on what America would eventually come to symbolize; a literary critic, in fact, has aptly pointed out that the book contains the “genetic code” of the country. Beginning with its iconic yet disarmingly simple opening line “Call me Ishmael”, the story explores the monomaniac hunt for the titular “White Whale” by Ahab, Captain of the Nantucket based whaling ship Pequod whose crew the erudite narrator is a part of.