Abridging Moby Dick

Abridged Text, followed by Abridger Notes, followed by multimedia, followed by Original Text with deletions .   Epilogue   "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Job.   The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? —Because one did survive the wreck. It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till...

Abridged Text, followed by Abridger Notes, followed by multimedia, followed by Original Text with deletions .   Chapter 135 The Chase. Third Day   The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh.   “A fairer day could not dawn upon that world” thought Ahab; “but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. How the wild winds blow. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! These wa...