Moby Dick; or, the Whale

Herman Melville's Moby Dick sits close to the top of any list of American novels of the nineteenth century. Despite (or perhaps because of) that eminence, surprisingly few artists have attempted to capture Melville's epic tale in an illustrated edition. In his version, Barry Moser takes an unusual approach, working with the rhythm and visual language of nineteenth-century book illustration to convey much of the feeling of an American illustrated book of the 1850s or 60s without actually imitating such publications.

This version of Moby Dick features many subtle touches, such as special paper with a light blue tint, meant to evoke the ocean. But Moser gets at bigger questions, too. In Moby Dick, the characters’ true nature and the reliability of the narrator remain in question from beginning to end. Moser nudges gently at that problem by creating illustrations for a great human epic that include no images of people. He shows us the ships and whales and the sea, but characters such as Ahab, Queequeg, and the mysterious narrator called "Ishmael" are left entirely to our imaginations.