Moby-Dick

Name: Moby-Dick
Author: Herman Melville

Original author

Herman Melville

Adapted by

Line by Line Publishing,

Read Moby-Dick by Herman Melville in French and English, a parallel text graded reader with audio. Available in CEFR levels A2, B1, B2, and C2.

About this book

"Call me Ishmael." With those three words, a melancholy wanderer takes to the sea to cure his spleen, and the book follows him from a dilapidated New Bedford inn to the deck of a Nantucket whaler. At the Spouter-Inn he is made to share a bed with an absent harpooneer, and when the tattooed cannibal Queequeg finally climbs in beside him with a lit tomahawk-pipe, fear gives way to something rarer. The two become bosom friends, forehead to forehead, sworn to die for one another. "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian," Ishmael decides, and the reversal, delivered without a shred of preaching, sets the book's moral compass early.

The ship is the Pequod, her bulwarks garnished with sperm-whale teeth, her tiller carved from a jawbone, a vessel that looks like a trophy of the hunt it means to continue. Her captain keeps to his cabin at first. When Ahab finally appears, bronze-faced, ivory-legged, a livid scar running down him like a lightning-scored tree, he summons the crew aft, nails a gold doubloon to the mast, and bends the entire voyage toward the white whale that took his leg. Melville renders him as a man who cannot enjoy beauty, who sees all visible objects as pasteboard masks and means to strike through.

Around that fixed purpose gather the imperturbable, pipe-smoking Stubb, the devout Starbuck who dares to argue and cannot break free, and the cabin boy Pip, abandoned once in the open sea and returned from it visionary and mad. The story pauses often: to weigh the terror of whiteness across every civilization Ishmael can name, to turn navigation and probability into meditations on selfhood and obsession. Threaded through the dread is a deadpan humor, and beneath the philosophy a steady Gothic foreboding.

This is a sea chase that keeps opening outward into questions larger than any hunt. The pursuit is total, and it means to take everything with it.

Available editions

Short, concrete sentences for early learners.

8,434 sentences

Longer sentences and a wider vocabulary.

8,434 sentences

Complex sentences and a fuller vocabulary, close to everyday native reading.

8,434 sentences

Original English — The most complex prose — long, intricate sentences, and advanced vocabulary.

8,434 sentences

Read a sample

Mirages

Loomings

Appelez-moi Ismaël.

Call me Ishmael.

Il y a quelques années — je ne dirai pas exactement combien de temps — j’avais peu ou pas d’argent.

Some years ago — I won’t say exactly how long — I had little or no money.

Je n’avais rien de spécial non plus pour me retenir sur la terre.

I also had nothing special to keep me on land.

Alors j’ai décidé de naviguer un peu et de voir la partie d’eau du monde.

So I decided to sail for a while and see the watery part of the world.

C’est comme ça que je me sens mieux et plus actif.

This is how I feel better and more active.

Parfois, ma bouche est serrée et triste.

Sometimes my mouth feels tight and grim.

Parfois, mon âme ressemble à un mois de novembre humide et gris.

Sometimes my soul feels like a wet, gray November.

History

Written by Herman Melville in English
Adapted by Line by Line Publishing in 2026

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