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4 - Melville, at sea in the city

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2010

Cyrus R. K. Patell
Affiliation:
New York University
Bryan Waterman
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long ago 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. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Like a stranger suddenly sidling up as you walk down Broadway, or perhaps some young eccentric sitting alone at a bar determined to bend your ear a little, Herman Melville's novel of 1851, Moby-Dick, introduces itself to readers in an abrupt but engaging manner. Through a narrator named Ishmael, Melville gives voice to a modern consciousness as original as any in American literature. It is a voice as startling and unselfconscious as the manner in which people sometimes talk to themselves as they walk crowded streets of modern cities, or wander crowded thoughts of modern life.

Though Melville will devote most of his novel’s great length to a whaling enterprise and shipboard life, the first chapter of Moby-Dick remains anchored in a brief tour of lower Manhattan (see Figure 5 ).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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