What’s in a
guide?
The Philosophy of Moby Dick
In this tutorial you will learn how to use Book Rags to find information on the philosophy of Moby Dick. You can use this information to search other titles afterwards. Look at Moby Dick’s home page:
There are three menus: The main menu. The friendly versions menu. The related topics menu.
The main menu It is on the left of the page. By clicking on the links you can access to the contents. You can find two different summaries: a short one, clicking on Plot Summary, and larger ones in groups of chapters (1-2, 3, 4-6...). Since Moby Dick is such a monster book there are a lot of chapter summaries! Read the Author Information page to learn important facts of Melville’s life and context. He actually was a sailor on a whaler and knew well what he wrote about. There are many symbols in Moby Dick. The Characters and Places & Objects pages will help you get a deeper insight of them. But, from a philosophical point of view, the Themes & Topics page is the most important one. The four main topics are separately tracked across the chapters, with very precise indications of chapter number and quotes. There are excerpts from the book quoted on most sections of the guide, but you can find them all gathered in the Quotes page. When writing about a book remember to always support your statements and arguments with literal quotations!
The friendly versions menu Book Rags’ pages are designed to make it easier for the readers to find the information they are looking for - and to make them watch a lot of ads too! But if you want to print the guide or download it to make your own notes, you need something different. In this menu you can access to a printable version, where all the information is ready at-a-glance. You can even copy it all and paste it on an Open Office file. There are PDF and Word versions to download too, but in this case the bad news is - you have to pay for them!
The Related Topics menu Are you a Moby Dick freak? Do you want to continue the study of any of the topics in this novel? Or do you need more specific information about Herman Melville? Then the Related Topics menu, on the right side of the page, can help you. In this menu there are suggestions of further readings on this site: Herman Melville’s study pack, guides to other works from this author, etc.
IES PEDRO FLORIANI - REDONDELA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE LINGUA INGLESA E LITERATURA