".Melville's great novel, as Mr. Zoellner reads it, is not the story of a crippled and maddened Captain Ahab seeking in hate and vengeance to destroy the thing which mutilated him. Instead, it is the story of a questing, vision-seeking Ishmael, haunted by unbidden infidelities and tortured by a neurotic sense of the sharkishness of the universe, who comes under the influence of Ahab's hypnotic power and then gradually escapes, in the process fashioning for himself a new vision of the universe and a new version of the White Whale."--jacket.