Moby Dick: The Harpoon and the Human Condition

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There are novels that tell a story, and there are novels that attempt to swallow the universe whole. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s vast, unwieldy, and fiercely strange masterpiece, belongs unapologetically to the latter. First published in 1851 to confused reviews and commercial indifference, the novel now looms over American literature like its own great whale—mysterious, intimidating, impossible to ignore. On its surface, the book is a sea tale, chronicling the doomed voyage of the Pequod and its monomaniacal captain, Ahab, who seeks vengeance against the great white whale that took his leg. But to reduce Moby-Dick to its plot is like…