Moby-Dick, or the Whale
This review is about the book called Moby-Dick, or the Whale that was written by Herman Melville. It was written and published in the USA in 1851 and is still considered one of the best American books of all times. I can understand why because I read the book in one day easily even though it had 560 pages with small letters. Melville tells us a lot about whales in it, as you probably have guessed, and before you continue reading I want you to know that a harpoon is a weapon used to hunt whales. So what is this book and why do people consider it the best book?
Moby-Dick, or the Whale is all about whales as I already said. It is not an encyclopedia, it is fiction, but it tells a lot of interesting facts about whales. Let me tell you some of them.
- The fins, the whalebone, the hump and the teeth are not something that all whales have. It is quite hard to explain so here is the example: The humpback whale and the cachalot both have humps. That is all they are similar in. This same humpback whale and the greenland whale have the whalebone and that is all they are similar in. Many whales have different combinations of having these components.
- Whalers from all over the world found whales that have harpoons stabbed in them. Harpoons are weapons used for hunting whales. So they can survive that. The whale with the most harpoons in him that survived had more than 100 harpoons in him! That is a lot!
- The whalers hunted whales for their oil. People lighted up their houses with the whale oil the whalers got. So in the middle 1800s this was a whole industry that brought in a lot of money.
- The whalers that were responsible for getting the oil out of a whale would climb inside the already dead animal and get oil out of there with buckets. A LOT of buckets.
So the plot itself is from the author's point of view, he really likes whales and the industry of whaling itself and he goes on a ship that hunts them. He makes friends with a man that is a pagan and a cannibal. But mostly the book is about the ship captain Ahab. He lost his leg during a fight with a whale and he wanted revenge on all the whales. But what he didn't realize was that you can't revenge animals and nature itself, in fact.
Well, I really liked the book and I hope that I understood most of its parts. In a year or a few I will come back to it and review it again because I am sure that there are many more meanings than I saw while reading.