Moby-Dick (Video)

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: it's one of the heftiest American novels ever written, and one that instills a deep fear in the bones of readers. This massive, tough novel about a massive, tough whale stirs up a tsunami of musings on God, morals, revenge, and madness—all mixed in with more blood and guts than a Tarantino movie.

Sounds like a shipwreck waiting to happen.

Rather than fleeing the storm, we here on the Unsinkable Ship Shmoop are taking a full-throttle stab at Moby-Dick. (We're talking about the book here, not the whale.) We're trimming the blubber and gunning it through the choppy seas with an eight-lesson video course.

The videos, quizzes, and fishy humor will save you from your drowning and help you:

• grasp how a whaling adventure story is also about fate, revenge, morals, and religion.
• untangle the insane amount of interconnected oceanic and religious symbols and metaphors.
• pick apart the weird narrative forms and random whale-speak that Melville throws at you, cause it's not just for funsies.
• wrap your head around the cool points that Melville's trying to make about characters like Ishmael, Ahab, Queequeg, and Elijah.

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