Moby-Dick
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.
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Summary
Ishmael, the novel's narrator, introduces himself in three of the most quoted words in American literature. He is restless, broke, melancholic — and the cure he proposes is the open sea. The voice is conversational, ironic, and about to expand into one of the largest fictional voices ever written.
Themes to continue
- The voice as the central character — Ishmael's tone is the engine. Continuations that match his irony, digression, and self-awareness will succeed.
- Spleen and motion — the opening makes a small joke about depression and travel as cure. There is plenty of room for a continuation that takes the joke into shadow.
- Whaling as metaphor — the literal labor (the dirty, dangerous trade of whaling) is also a map of obsession. Continuations need not arrive at the ship in a rush.
Vocabulary
- Spleen — Victorian shorthand for melancholy or low spirits, derived from the supposed seat of black bile.
- The watery part of the world — Melville's deflating phrase for the ocean. The deflation is the point.
Continuation prompts
- Stay with Ishmael's voice. Where does he sleep that first night?
- Switch to a stranger he meets at the inn.
- Skip ahead: a single dated entry from much later, when he is somewhere very different.
About the author
Herman Melville (1819–1891) sailed on a whaler himself before becoming a novelist. Moby-Dick (1851) was a commercial failure during his lifetime; he died in obscurity. The novel was rediscovered in the 1920s and is now widely held to be the great American novel.