Moby Dick cover art

Moby Dick

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

$8.99/mo after trial ends. Cancel anytime
Try for $0.00
More purchase options

Moby Dick

By: Herman Melville
Narrated by: William Hootkins
Try for $0.00

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $41.38

Buy Now for $41.38

"Call me Ishmael." Thus starts the greatest American novel. Melville said himself that he wanted to write "a mighty book about a mighty theme" and so he did. It is a story of one man's obsessive revenge-journey against the white whale, Moby-Dick, who injured him in an earlier meeting. Woven into the story of the last journey of The Pequod is a mesh of philosophy, rumination, religion, history, and a mass of information about whaling through the ages.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

Public Domain (P)2005 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. United States World Literature
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
Easily the most frustrating book I’ve ever read. Just as Melville starts reeling you into the story (pun intended) he goes off on a tangent for literal hours about the anatomy of a whale or some similarly dull topic. Painful to complete. Well narrated though.

Frustrating

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The voice acting in this audiobook was absolutely phenomenal. The narrator gave life to what otherwise would have been a bit of a slog. I loved it.

Incredible voice acting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Melville is so keen to brandish his knowledge of cetology that the story oftentimes stalls, and his clunky use of figures of rhetoric becomes tiresome.

If his research had been edited down so that it complemented the moral and thematic lines of story, then the whole tome would have been less scholarly and more literary.

If you're willing to be battered by facts, epizeuxis and alliteration, then welcome to Moby Dick.

The narration is excellent, and you'll comfortably zip through this at 2.5 speed

Excellent narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrator did a wonderful job at bringing the story to life, colouring the characters with their unique personality and also made the old English language easier to follow

My largest complaint is not the story nor the narrator, but the way the “chapters” are lazily arranged, so that you cannot reliably select the exact chapters you wish—an infuriating experience

Narrator performed amazingly!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I owe it to the narrator’s incredible voice acting that I finished. I’m glad I read this book, as I’ve been wanting to give it a try for a long time, but there’s no denying that it’s a slog in places. I think if I were ever to read it again I’d look for an abridged version.

Excellent audiobook

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.