Moby-Dick Spoiler Alert!

(Side-question - do you need to say spoiler alert when the book came out 157 years ago? I think that's a long enough grace period, but anyway.)

Welcome to this edition of Nick's Notes - Moby Dick!

(Apologies to Cliff's Notes and Spark Notes, please don't sue me okay?)

Call me Ishmael. I assume you know a lot about the Bible and mythology? Good. I wanted to go to sea some time ago, so I found a pagan named Queequeg to ship off with. We formed a strangely homoerotic relationship that doesn't quite resurface until the very end, and then only in metaphor. Anyway, we both wanted to go to sea, so we went on this boat and there was this eloquently crazy captain who didn't even come on deck for like a few months. But then he did come out and he only had one leg! The other was a whale bone or something.

Ahab (the captain with one leg) told us that a whale had bitten the other leg off, and that we were hunting that one whale (Moby Dick). Ahab bound the crew to this through a near-religious ceremony. This was all recounted with great prose by me, Ishmael.

Then I decided to explain every aspect of the whaling industry in a pretty awesome way, every now and then injecting some story into it.

We met some other boats, and asked them all if they knew where this crazy whale was, and only a couple had heard of him. Oh man, then the story really ramps up at the end, when I finish explaining all the whaling stuff and it's just story. I say some Biblical metaphors. Queequeg gets sick and almost dies, and gets the carpenter to build him a coffin, but then Queequeg gets better and we decide to use the coffin for a life-buoy after we waste on of our life-buoys on some guy who fell off the boat and died. Then with like 20 pages left, we see Moby Dick. He kicks the boat's ass completely for three whole days, and at the end everyone but me dies because he completely shatters our boat. I float to safety on Queequeg's coffin. Contemporary literary criticism is mixed, but eventually most people who read my book like it a lot.

Congratulations! You've just heard a retelling of Moby Dick which takes out all the beautiful language and complex metaphors and imagery and humor! That is not at all what the book is like, which is why Cliff's Notes and Spark Notes should go out of business.