Moby Dick by Herman Melville was very similar yet very different from The Odyssey by Homer. Moby Dick was set in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century in America, but later on the setting of the story is the Peqoud, which is a whaling vessel. The Odyssey is set in ancient Greece and the setting is changed many times because Odysseus is traveling on a ship on his way home to Ithaca. These books are similar because in each someone is striving to reach a goal but it is just out of reach. These books are also different. For example, in The Odyssey, Odysseus is given aid by Athena, a goddess, but in Moby Dick, Ahab is given aid but is the only one motivated to kill Moby Dick and so is given a lackluster effort. Another difference were the motives Ahab and Odysseus had for achieving their goals.
             In Moby Dick Ahab is trying to achieve his goal, killing Moby Dick, and in The Odyssey Odysseus is trying to achieve his goal, which his go home and be with his wife, Penelope. Ahab wants to kill Moby Dick, his arch enemy, because he had bitten on his leg and scared him in a prior encounter.
             He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his gray hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but bran...