WORKS

His first book, Typee, was based on his time spent among the supposedly cannibalistic but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. The book praises the islanders and their natural, harmonious life, and criticizes the Christian missionaries, who Melville found less genuinely civilized than the people they came to convert.

 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like man,” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic connotations. In chapter 15, “The Right Whale’s Head,” the narrator says that the Right Whale is a Stoic and the Sperm Whale is a Platonian, referring to two classical schools of philosophy. Although Melville’s novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In MobyDick, Melville challengesEmerson’s optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and whaling cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the contrary, the facts themselves tend to become symbols, and every fact is obscurely related in a cosmic web to every other fact.

Characters

Moby Dick is probably one of the most dreaded stories for students in high school and college classrooms, because it's known for being extremely long, elaborate and boring. What most readers, or prospective readers, don't know is that the novel has influenced many areas of current culture, including the most famous coffee chain in America. Yep, Starbucks. The Starbucks founders chose the name because of its association with the ocean. (Initially, they were going to name it after the ship in the story, the 'Pequod', but that sounded kind of gross.)
But if the pop-culture connection isn't enough to catch your interest, consider that the author Herman Melville, who is writing about a bunch of seamen searching for a gigantic sperm whale with the name 'Dick,' did not fail to notice the obvious humor in such things. And while the story is a rather serious piece about evil and revenge, it's full of vulgar sex jokes that would make even the raunchiest of readers blush. In other words, the story is entertaining on a variety of levels, and worth the read, in spite of its reputation.

Ishmael, Captain Ahab and Moby Dick are central characters in the story

There are tons of characters in the story, some having more definition than others, but for the most part, there are three we need to remember. Ishmael is our 'narrator' who is about to start out on his first whaling adventure. Captain Ahab is the captain of the ship called the Pequod. He is on a vengeful hunt for a huge white whale called Moby Dick.
And who, or what, is Moby Dick? Well, aside from being a giant white whale, about 90 feet long, he is the object in the story onto which all of the characters sort of project their own interpretations. He is the central part of the story even though he only shows up in three chapters. Three out of 135.