The Whale

Moby Dick, novel by Herman Melville, published in London in October 1851 as The Whale and a month later in the United States as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. It is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Moby Dick is generally regarded as its author’s masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels.

Have a look at the first chapter of this  considered "first  modern novel" a description of  the Cast and set as part of a timeless and allegorical world, Moby Dick is a novel rich in symbolism and metaphor. The names of the characters all have biblical resonances, and the Epilogue begins with a quotation from the Book of Job: “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” The novel’s extraordinary oddness comprises an encyclopedia of whaling lore, a Biblical meditation on the value of life, and a study of humankind’s relationship with others as well as with nature. The adventures that take place in the novel are so well known that they have entered the American consciousness.

“Call me Ishmael,” the narrator proclaims, in one of the most famous opening lines in all of fiction. He is a young outcast, like his Biblical namesake, and he seeks to find real meaning by following a life at sea. He tells of the last voyage of the ship Pequod (named after the doomed Pequot tribe of New England Native Americans who succumbed to the white colonizers’ weapons or diseases) out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Captain Ahab is obsessed with the pursuit of a particular whale, the white whale Moby Dick. On that level, the work is an intense, superbly authentic narrative of New England whaling. Its theme and central figure, however, are reminiscent of Job and King Lear in his search for justice and of Oedipus in his search for truth. The novel’s richly symbolic language and convincingly imagined tragic hero are indicative of Melville’s deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges.

Also have a look at the last 3 min of the movie (Classical one)