American Literature books summary

Ishmael then returns to the plot: Stubb wants to eat the freshly killed whale, although most whalemen do not. (Usually the only creatures that eat whale meat are sharks.) He calls on the black cook Fleece to make his supper and make the sharks stop eating the whale esh. In a sermon to the sharks, the cook tells them that they ought to be more civilized. Stubb and the cook get into a folksy religious discussion. He then likens Stubb to a shark. Ishmael then feels that he must describe what whale is like as a dish. Doing a historical survey of whale-as-dish, Ishmael remarks that no one except for Stubb and the "Esquimaux" accept it now. Deterrents include the exceedingly rich quality of the meat and its prodigious quantities.

Furthermore, it seems wrong because hunting the whale makes the meat a "noble dish" and one has to eat the meat by the whale's own light. But perhaps this blasphemy isn't so rare, says Ishmael, since the readers probably eat beef with a knife made from the bone of oxen or pick their teeth after eating goose with a goose feather.

Chapters 66-73

Summary

These chapters get into the minutiae of whaling technique. The Shark Massacre describes how sharks often swarm around dead whale carcasses, forcing whalemen to poke them with spades or kill them. Even when sharks are dead, they are often still dangerous: once, when Queequeg brought one on deck for its skin, it nearly took his hand off. There's no sacred Sabbath in whaling, since the gory business of cutting in occurs whenever there is a kill. Cutting in involves inserting a hook in the whale's blubber and peeling the blubber off as one might peel off an orange rind in one strip. Discussing the whale's blubber, Ishmael realizes that it is dificult to determine exactly what the whale's skin is. There is something thin and isinglass-like, but that's only the skin of the skin. If we decide that the blubber of the whale (the long pieces of which are called "blanket-pieces") is the skin, we are still missing something since blubber only accounts for 3/4 of the weight of the blanket-pieces. After cutting in, the whale is then released for its "funeral" in which the "mourners" are vultures and sharks. The frightful white carcass oats away and a "vengeful ghost" hovers over it, deterring other ships from going near it.

Ishmael backtracks in The Sphynx, saying that before whalers let a carcass go, they behead it in a "scientific anatomical feat." Ahab talks to this head, asking it to tell him of the horrors that it has seen. But Ahab knows that it doesn't speak and laments its inability to speak: too many horrors are beyond utterance.

The chapter about the Jeroboam (a ship carrying some epidemic) also backtracks, referring back to a story Stubb heard during the gam with the Town-Ho. A man, who had been a prophet among the Shakers in New York, proclaimed himself the archangel Gabriel on the ship and mesmerized the crew. Captain Mayhew wanted to get rid of him at the next port, but the crew threatened desertion. And the sailors aboard the Pequod now see this very Gabriel in front of them. When Captain Mayhew is telling Ahab a story about the White Whale, Gabriel keeps interrupting. According to Mayhew, the Jeroboam first heard about the existence of Moby Dick when they were speaking to another ship. Gabriel then warned against killing it, calling it the Shaker God incarnated. They ran into it about a year afterwards and the ship's leaders decided to hunt it. As the mate was standing in the ship to throw his lance, the whale ipped the mate into the air and tossed him into the sea. Nothing was harmed except for the mate, who drowned. Gabriel, the entire time, had been on the mast-head and said, basically, "I told you so." When Ahab confirms that he intends to hunt the white whale still, Gabriel points to him, saying, "Think, think of the blasphemer - dead, and down there! - beware of the blasphemer's end!" Ahab then realizes that the Pequod is carrying a letter for the dead mate and tries to hand it over to the captain on the end of a cutting-spade pole. Somehow, Gabriel gets a hold of it, impales it on the boat-knife, and sends it back to Ahab's feet as the Jeroboam pulls away.

Ishmael backtracks again in The Monkey-Rope to explain how Queequeg inserts the blubber hook. Ishmael, as Queequeg's bowsman, ties the monkey-rope around his waist as Queequeg is on the whale's oating body trying to attach the hook. (In a footnote, we learn that only on the Pequod were the monkey and this holder actually tied together, an improvement introduced by Stubb.) While Ishmael holds him, Tashtego and Daggoo are also ourishing their whale-spades to keep the sharks away. When Dough-Boy, the steward, offers Queequeg some tepid ginger and water, the mates frown at the in uence of pesky Temperance activists and make the steward bring him alcohol.

Meanwhile, as the Pequod oats along, they spot a right whale. After killing him, Stubb asks Flask what Ahab might want with this "lump of foul lard." Flask responds that Fedallah says that a whaler with a Sperm Whale's head on her starboard side and a Right Whale's head on her larboard will never afterwards capsize. They then get into a discussion in which both of them confess that they do not like Fedallah and think of him as "the devil in disguise." In this instance and always, Fedallah watches and stands in Ahab's shadow. Ishmael notes that the Parsee's shadow seemed to blend with and lengthen Ahab's.

Chapters 74-81

Summary

The paired chapters (74 and 75) do an anatomic comparison of the sperm whale's head and the right whale's head. In short, the sperm whale has a great well of sperm, ivory teeth, long lower jaw, and one external spout-hole; the right whale has bones shaped like Venetian blinds in his mouth, huge lower lip, a tongue, and one external spout- hole. Ishmael calls the right whale stoic and the sperm "platonian." The Battering-Ram discusses the blunt, large, wall-like part of the head that seems to be just a "wad." In actuality, inside the thin, sturdy casing is a "mass of tremendous life." He goes on to explain, in The Great Heidelberg Tun (a wine cask in Heidelberg with a capacity of 49,000 gallons), that there are two subdivisions of the upper part of a whale's head: the Case and the junk. The Case is the Great Heidelberg Tun since it contains the highly-prized spermaceti. Ishmael then dramatizes the tapping of the case by Tashtego. It goes by bucket from the "cistern" (well) once Tashtego finds the spot. In this scene, Tashtego accidentally falls in to the case. In panic, Daggoo fouls the lines and the head falls into the ocean. Queequeg dives in and manages to save Tashtego.

In The Prairie, Ishmael discusses the nineteenth-century arts of physiognomy (the art of judging human character from facial features)and phrenology (the study of the shape of the skull, based on the belief that it reveals character and mental capacity). By such analyses, the sperm whale's large, clear brow gives him the dignity of god. The whale's "pyramidical silence" demonstrates the sperm whale's genius. But later Ishmael abandons this line of analysis, saying that he isn't a professional. Besides, the whale wears a "false brow" because it really doesn't have much in its skull besides the spermy stufi. (The brain is about 10 inches big.) Ishmael then says that he would rather feel a man's spine to know him than his skull, throwing out phrenology. Judging by spines (which, like brains, are a network of nerves) would discount the smallness of the whale's brain and admire the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. The hump becomes a sign of the whale's indomitable spirit.

The Jungfrau (meaning Virgin in German) is out of oil and meets the Pequod to beg for some. Ahab, of course, asks about the White Whale, but the Jungfrau has no information. Almost immediately after the captain of the Jungfrau steps off the Pequod's deck, whales are sighted and he goes after them desperately. The Pequod also gives chase and succeeds in harpooning the whale before the Germans. But, after bringing the carcass alongside the ship, they discover that the whale is sinking and dragging the ship along with it. Ishmael then discusses the frequency of sinking whales.

The Jungfrau starts chasing a fin-back, a whale that resembles a sperm whale to the unskilled observer.

Chapter 82-92

Summary

Ishmael strays from the main action of the plot again, diving into the heroic history of whaling. First, he draws from Greek mythology, the Judeo-Christian Bible, and Hindu mythology. He then discusses the Jonah story in particular (a story that has been shadowing this entire novel from the start) through the eyes of an old Sag-Harbor whaleman who is crusty and questions the Jonah story based on personal experience.

Ishmael then discusses pitchpoling by describing Stubb going through the motions (throwing a long lance from a jerking boat to secure a running whale). He then goes into a discursive explanation of how whales spout with some attempt at scientific precision. But he cannot define exactly what the spout is, so he has to put forward a hypothesis: the spout is nothing but mist, like the "semi- visible steam" that proceeds from the head of ponderous beings such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and himself! In the next chapter, he celebrates a whale's most famous part: his tail. He likes its potential power and lists its difierent uses.

When the Pequod sails through the straits of Sunda (near Indonesia) without pulling into any port, Ishmael takes the opportunity to discuss how isolated and self- contained a whaleship is. While in the straits, they run into a great herd of sperm whales swimming in a circle (the "Grand Armada"){ but as they are chasing the whales, they are being chased by Malay pirates. They try to "drugg" the whales so that they can kill them on their own time.

(There are too many to try to kill at once.) They escape the pirates and go in boats after the whales, somehow ending up inside their circle, a placid lake.

But one whale, who had been pricked and was oundering in pain, panics the whole herd. The boats in the middle are in danger but manage to get out of the center of the chaos. They try to "waif" the whales{that is, mark them as the Pequod's to be taken later. Ishmael then goes back to explaining whaling terms, staring with "schools" of whales. The schoolmaster is the head of the school, or the lord. The all-male schools are like a "mob of young collegians." Backtracking to a reference in Chapter 87 about waifs, Ishmael explains how the waif works as a symbol in the whale fishery. He goes on to talk about historical whaling codes and the present one that a Fast- Fish belongs to the party fast to it and a Loose-Fish is fair came for anybody who can soonest catch it. A fish is fast when it is physically connected (by rope, etc.) to the party after it or it bears a waif, says Ishmael. Lawyer- like, Ishmael cites precedents and stories, to show how dificult it is to maintain rules. In Heads or Tails, he mentions the strange problem with these rules in England because the King and Queen claim the whale. Some whalemen in Dover (or some port near there, says Ishmael) lost their whale to the Duke because he claimed the power delegated him from the sovereign.

Returning to the narrative, Ishmael says they come up on a French ship Bouton de Rose (Rose-Button or Rose- Bud). This ship has two whales alongside: one "blasted whale" (one that died unmolested on the sea) that is going to have nothing useful in it and one whale that died from indigestion.

Stubb asks a sailor about the White Whale? Never seen him, is the answer. Crafty Stubb then asks why the man is trying to get oil out of these whales when clearly there is none in either whale. The sailor on the Rose-Bud says that his captain, on his first trip, will not believe the sailor's own statements that the whales are worthless. Stubb goes aboard to tell the captain that the whales are worthless, although he knows that the second whale might have ambergris, an even more precious commodity than spermaceti. Stubb and the sailor make up a little plan in which Stubb says ridiculous things in English and the sailor says, in French, what he himself wants to say. The captain dumps the whales. As soon as the Rose-Bud leaves, Stubb mines and finds the sweet- smelling ambergris.

Ishmael, in the next chapter, explains what ambergris is: though it looks like mottled cheese and comes from the bowel of whales, ambergris is actually used for perfumes. He uses dry legal language to describe ambergris and discuss its history even though he acknowledges that poets have praised it.

Ishmael then looks at where the idea that whales smell bad comes from. Some whaling vessels might have skipped cleaning themselves a long time ago, but the current bunch of South Sea Whalers always scrub themselves clean. The oil of the whale works as a natural soap.

Chapters 93-101

Summary

These are among the most important chapters in Moby- Dick. In The Castaway, Pip, who usually watches the ship when the boats go out, becomes a replacement in Stubb's boat. Having performed passably the first time out, Pip goes out a second time and this time he jumps from the boat out of anxiety. When Pip gets foul in the lines, and his boatmates have to let the whale go free to save him, he makes them angry. Stubb tells him never to jump out of the boat again because Stubb won't pick him up next time. Pip, however, does jump again, and is left alone in the middle of the sea's "heartless immensity." Pip goes mad.

A Squeeze of the Hand, which describes the baling of the case (emptying the sperm's head), is one of the funniest chapters in the novel. Because the spermaceti quickly cools into lumps, the sailors have to squeeze it back into liquid. Here, Ishmael goes overboard with his enthusiasm for the "sweet and unctuous" sperm. He squeezes all morning long, getting sentimental about the physical contact with the other sailors, whose hands he encounters in the sperm. He goes on to describe the other parts of the whale, including the euphemistically-named "cassock" (the whale's penis). This chapter is also very funny, blasphemously likening the whale's organ to the dress of clergymen because it has some pagan mysticism attached to it. It serves an actual purpose on the ship: the mincer wears the black "pelt" of skin from the penis to protect himself while he slices the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots.

Ishmael then tries to explain the try-works, heavy structures made of pots and furnaces that boil the blubber and derive all the oil from it. He associates the try-works with darkness and a sense of exotic evil: it has "an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres." Furthermore, the pagan harpooneers tend it. Ishmael also associates it with the red fires of Hell that, in combination with the black sea and the dark night, so disorient him that he loses sense of himself at the tiller. Everything becomes "inverted," he says, and suddenly there is "no compass before me to steer by."

In a very short chapter, Ishmael describes in The Lamp how whalemen are always in the light because their job is to collect oil from the seas. He then finishes describing how whale's oil is processed: putting the oil in casks and cleaning up the ship. Here he dismisses another myth about whaling: whalers are not dirty. Sperm whale's oil is a fine cleaning agent. But Ishmael admits that whalers are hardly clean for a day when the next whale is sighted and the cycle begins again.

Ishmael returns to talking about the characters again, showing the reactions of Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, the Manxman, Queequeg, Fedallah, and Pip to the golden coin fixed on the mainmast. Ahab looks at the doubloon from Ecuador and sees himself and the pains of man. Starbuck sees some Biblical significance about how man can find little solace in times of trouble. Stubb, first saying he wants to spend it, looks deeper at the doubloon because he saw his two superiors gazing meaningfully at it. He can find little but some funny dancing zodiac signs. Then Flask approaches, and says he sees "nothing here, round thing made of gold and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So what's all this staring been about?" Pip is the last to look at the coin and says, prophetically, that here's the ship's "navel"{ something at the center of the ship, holding it together.

Then the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby, a whaling ship from London with a jolly captain and crew. The first thing Ahab asks, of course, is if they have seen Moby Dick. The captain, named Boomer, has, and is missing an arm because of it. The story is pretty gory, but Boomer does not dwell too much on the horrible details, choosing instead to talk about the hot rum toddies he drank during his recovery. The ship encountered the white whale again but did not want to try to fasten to it. Although the people on board the Enderby think he is crazy, Ahab insists on knowing which way the whale went and returns to his ship to pursue it.

In the next chapter, Ishmael backtracks, to explain why the name Enderby is significant: this man fitted the first ever English sperm whaling ship.

Ishmael then exuberantly explains the history behind Enderby's before telling the story of the particular whaler Samuel Enderby. The good food aboard the Enderby earns the ship the title "Decanter."

Chapter 102-114

Summary

Ishmael now tries another tactic for interpreting the whale. In the chapter called A Bower in the Arsacides, he discusses how he learned to measure a whale's bones. When he was visiting his friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, he lived in a culture in which the whale skeleton was sacred. After telling how he learned to measure, he goes on to tell the results of the measurements. He begins with the skull, the biggest part, then the ribs, and the spine. But these bones, he cautions, give only a partial picture of the whale since so much esh is wrapped around them. A person cannot still find good representation of a whale in its entirety.

And Ishmael continues to "manhandle" the whale, self- consciously saying that he does the best he knows how. So he decides to look at the Fossil Whale from an "archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view." He can't be too grandiloquent with his exaggerated words and diction because the whale itself is so grand. He ashes credentials again, this time as a geologist and then discusses his finds. But, again, he is unsatisfied: "the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body." But this chapter does give a sense of the whale's age and his pedigree.

Ishmael finally gives up, in awe, deconstructing the whale- -now he wants to know if such a fabulous monster will remain on the earth. Ishmael says that though they may not travel in herds anymore, though they may have changed haunting grounds, they remain. Why? Because they have established a new home base at the poles, where man cannot penetrate; because they've been hunted throughout history and still remain; because the whale population is not in danger for survival since many generations of whales are alive at the same time.

Ahab asks the carpenter to make him a new leg because the one he uses is not trustworthy. After hitting it heavily on the boat's wooden oor when he returned from the Enderby, he does not think it will keep holding. Indeed, just before the Pequod sailed, Ahab had been found lying on the ground with the whalebone leg gouging out his thigh. So the carpenter, the do-it-all man on the ship, has to make Ahab a new prosthetic leg. They discuss the feeling of a ghost leg. When Ahab leaves, the carpenter thinks he is a little queer.

A sailor then informs Ahab, in front of Starbuck, that the oil casks are leaking. The sailor suggests that they stop to fix them, but Ahab refuses to stop, saying that he doesn't care about the owners or profft. Starbuck objects and Ahab points a musket at him. Says Starbuck, "I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man." In cleaning out the stowed oil casks, Queequeg falls sick. Thinking he is going to die, Queequeg orders a coffn made. He lies in it and closes the cover, as Pip dances around the coffn. Soon, Queequeg feels well again and gets out. Ishmael attributes this to his "savage" nature.

In The Pacific, Ishmael gets caught up in the meditative, serene Pacific Ocean. At the end of the chapter, he comes back to Ahab, saying that no such calming thoughts entered the brain of the captain. Ishmael then pans over to the blacksmith whose life on land disintegrated. With characteristic panache, Ishmael explains that the sea beckons to broken-hearted men who long for death but cannot commit suicide. The Forge dramatizes an exchange between the blacksmith and Ahab in which the captain asks the blacksmith to make a special harpoon to kill the white whale. Although Ahab gives the blacksmith directions, he takes over the crafting of the harpoon himself, hammering the steel on the anvil and tempering it with the blood of the three harpooneers (instead of water). The scene ends with Pip's laughter.

In The Gilder, Ishmael considers how the dreaminess of the sea masks a ferocity. He speaks of the sea as "gilt" because it looks golden in the sun-set and is falsely calm. The sea even makes Starbuck rhapsodize, making an apostrophe (direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a speech or composition) to the sea; Stubb answers him by surprise and, as usual, makes light of the situation.

Chapters 115-125

Summary

These chapters show how badly off the Pequod really is. The somber Pequod, still on the lookout for Moby Dick, runs into the Bachelor, a festive Nantucket whaler on its way home with a full cargo. The captain of the Bachelor, saying that he has only heard stories of the white whale and doesn't believe them, invites Ahab and the crew to join his party. Ahab declines. The next day, the Pequod kills several whales and the way that a dying whale turns towards the sun spurs Ahab to speak out to it in wondrous tones. While keeping a night vigil over a whale that was too far away to take back to the ship immediately, Ahab hears from Fedallah the prophecy of his death. Before Ahab can die, he must see two hearses, one "not made by mortal hands" and one made of wood from America; and only hemp can kill the captain. Back on the ship, Ahab holds up a quadrant, an instrument that gauges the position of the sun, to determine the ship's latitude. Ahab decides that it does not give him the orienteering information he wants and tramples it underfoot. He orders the ship to change direction.

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