Q 01/05

What are the famous first three words of the novel?

A) Call me Ahab

B) Thar she blows

C) Call me Ishmael

D) Call me Jonah

Answer · why

C) Call me Ishmael

The narrator never confirms it is his real name; scholars split him into the young 'forecastle Ishmael' who sails and the older one who tells the tale...

Q 02/05

In which year was Moby-Dick first published?

A) 1861

B) 1871

C) 1881

D) 1851

Answer · why

D) 1851

It appeared in London in October as The Whale and in New York in November under its final title, after eighteen months of writing.

Q 03/05

What is the name of Captain Ahab's whaling ship?

A) Rachel

B) Essex

C) Acushnet

D) Pequod

Answer · why

D) Pequod

The narrator says the ship is named for a Native American tribe scattered in the 1600s, and one scholar reads the ship's destruction as an echo of tha...

Q 04/05

Ahab's ship is named after which people?

A) The Pequot tribe

B) The Wampanoag tribe

C) The Narragansett tribe

D) The Mohegan tribe

Answer · why

A) The Pequot tribe

The Mashantucket and Eastern Pequot still live on reservations in Connecticut; the name also echoes 'Pekod', a biblical word for punishment.

Q 05/05

Moby Dick is which species of cetacean?

A) Blue whale

B) Right whale

C) Humpback whale

D) Sperm whale

Answer · why

D) Sperm whale

The novel devotes whole chapters to the animal's anatomy, from the spermaceti in its head to its skeleton.