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 Dutch 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

Opdoemingen

Loomings

Noem mij Ishmael.

Call me Ishmael.

Een paar jaar geleden — ik zeg niet precies hoe lang — had ik weinig of geen geld.

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

Ik had ook niets bijzonders dat mij op het land hield.

I also had nothing special to keep me on land.

Dus besloot ik een tijdje te varen en het natte deel van de wereld te zien.

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

Zo voel ik mij beter en actiever.

This is how I feel better and more active.

Soms voelt mijn mond gespannen en somber.

Sometimes my mouth feels tight and grim.

Soms voelt mijn ziel als een natte, grijze november.

Sometimes my soul feels like a wet, gray November.

History

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

Also available in

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