Month: March 2021

Moby Dick is a very very long book, partially because the author enjoys going off on tangents and partially because he insists on providing thorough background details on the biology of whales and the nature of the whaling industry. And…

Time to ask the question: What is the most unique sentence in all of Moby Dick? What sort of writing can be found here and nowhere else? Like usual we approach the question from two different angles: 1) If we…

The vocabulary in Moby Dick leans heavily towards whaling terms. There are ships and sails. Oars and harpoons. Tides and waves. Blubber and oil. Most of all there are whales; over a thousand mentions of them. This is not surprising….

Herman Meliville’s Moby Dick, originally just named The Whale, is a famously philosophical and famously long swashbuckling adventure story about an eclectic group of whale hunters who sign up for what they think is going to be an ordinary three…