What is the first line of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'?

The first line of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is “Call me Ishmael.” It introduces the novel’s narrator, who tells the story retrospectively and invites readers to follow his account of the doomed voyage of the whaleship Pequod.

Ishmael is not the captain who drives the central hunt. That role belongs to Captain Ahab, whose pursuit of the white whale becomes the novel’s consuming conflict. Ishmael instead serves as a reflective observer, combining personal experience with passages about whaling, maritime life, religion, history, and natural science.

Moby-Dick was published in 1851, first in London as The Whale and then in the United States under the title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. The opening sentence has become one of American literature’s most recognizable lines. Readers sometimes confuse it with famous openings from other novels, such as “It was the best of times,” from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, but those words belong to a different work.