So you want to go a-readin’, do ye? Well, it’s a dangerous, thankless business, readin’. What? Still interested? Well, I must hasten to inform ye that readin’ has been banned and outlawed on the highest authority, on account of books being endangered and all. So you must form another dangerous, thankless plan.
tt
Ah, persistent I see. Well, come a little closer. Let me whisper in your ear. I know a crew that still reads. Yes, The Pequod is the ship. It’s manned by one Captain Ahab. Oh, he mumbles a lot to himself, but he’s no bad fellow. They depart tomorrow, to circle the wide oceans of the globe in search of books. You’re interested? Good. I’ll see you next day then. And who am I? Call me Ishmael.
tt
Welcome aboard, man. This is Starbuck, the first mate. This here is Stubb, that’s Flask. That’s my good buddy, Queequeg. Hey Queequeg!
tt
Now listen. There’s something I have to tell you. The captain—Captain Ahab, that is—has got something quite into his head of late. Well, you see his false leg? His real one was taken off by a book. But no ordinary book was this. It was a legendary, ferocious, vicious book. The Great White Book: Moby Dick. He has vowed revenge on this book, and is willing to sacrifice life and limb and crew and ship to get it.
tt
Ah, but how can a book be so dangerous? After all, we read books every week, some twice as big as Moby Dick. Well, let me tell ye. Moby Dick starts off as a novel. A regular, even pleasant one at that. But then, one hundred odd pages in, the book turns into something far stranger. First, a classificatory system of whales is proposed (which is highly inaccurate, I hasten to add). Then, the color white is dwelt upon. Then follows an extraordinarily detailed exploration of the anatomy of whales. These anatomical descriptions get so minute that one wonders whether one is reading Gray’s Anatomy. Also included are bizarre literary experiments—Shakespeare parodies, philosophical musings, etc., etc.
tt
The seeming irrelevancy of the huge middle chunk of the book is what is so dangerous about it. For, instead of it being a mere exercise in God-know’s-what, it is, in fact, a metaphorical exploration of nothing less than all of history and knowledge. Yes, indeed it is so. The water, the masts, the ship-mates, the captain, the whole damn thing is one gigantic, ever-changing metaphor.
tt
And what of the whale that gives the book its title? What does Moby Dick signify?
tt
Is Moby Dick nature, punishing the whalers for their slaughter of innocent creatures? Is he Melville’s struggle with greatness? Is he God? Or is Moby Dick simply fate? What about evil incarnate? Or, is Moby Dick a kind of pre-Freudian psychological device?—the object of Ahab’s displaced fears, hopes, and anger? Is Moby Dick a phallic symbol? A ram-shaped whale, filled with white spermaceti, named dick… And, while we’re at it, we can ask whether Moby Dick is a kind of allegory for the white race. It is telling that the three harpooners are “savages” (to use Melville’s term), and that the whale is distinguished by his whiteness.
tt
So now, do you foresee the challenge? It is a test of endurance to withstand the dry sections of description, and a test of reflection to ponder out the various significations of the actions depicted. So absolutely distinct and surpassingly brilliant is this book that it falls into no category, and can be called by no name. No name, that is, save one: Moby Dick.

Uma epopeia, uma obra-prima.

Quando abri o livro e comecei a ler «Tratem-me por Ismael. Há alguns anos - não interessa quando - achando-me com pouco ou nenhum dinheiro na carteira, e sem qualquer interesse particular que me prendesse à terra firme, apeteceu-me voltar a navegar e tornar a ver o mundo das águas.», mergulhei numa aventura por oceanos sem fim que Melville adjectiva ora de austeros, ora de calmos , ora de civilizados, ora de contemplativos.
Uma longa viagem através de 611 páginas que encerram a força magnética de uma escrita rara, uma leitura que me exigiu obstinação e teimosia, mas que , decididamente, valeu a pena.
«Moby Dick» é calhamaço, enciclopédia, manual de cetologia dentro de um romance que, por essa razão, tem muitas pausas na narrativa. Num resumo superficial pode dizer-se que «Moby Dick» é a história do maníaco capitão Ahab que decidiu vingar-se de uma enorme e terrível baleia branca que numa viagem anterior lhe tinha comido uma perna. Para perseguir esse enorme mamífero ( para Melville a baleia é um peixe) organiza uma expedição, num navio chamado Pequod com uma tripulação constituída por «mestiços, renegados, náufragos e canibais» e também Ismael, o narrador/herói.
No capítulo «O Pequod encontra O CELIBATÁRIO», página 526, lemos o seguinte:
«- Venha aqui a bordo, venha aqui a bordo! – gritava o alegre comandante do Celibatário, brandindo uma garrafa e um copo.
- Viste a Baleia Branca? – gritou Ahab como réplica.
- Não: ouvi apenas falar dela; mas não acredito em nada disso – respondeu o outro num tom de bom humor.»
Aí, eu pergunto-me : Moby Dick existia mesmo, ou era somente o símbolo de algo desconhecido e tudo não passou de uma enorme alegoria?
Um plano delirante mas metódico, uma impiedosa determinação, a obstinação de Alab para quem os menores factos se revestem sempre de um sentido pessoal, mas que, no final, não prestou a devida atenção ao presságio no combate fatal com a baleia, e o caos tomou conta do mundo, e foi jogar o jogo e morrer com ele, e, nesse sentido, é a história de uma obsessão.
Não é pois de espantar que Moby Dick continue a despertar grandes paixões e interpretações.
Vale a pena ler, apesar da dificuldade; daí eu ter estabelecido um plano de leitura: poucas páginas por dia. A minha resenha é simples, mas já posso dizer: Li «Moby Dick» e adorei: afinal, é o mais importante.
Para terminar, gostaria de citar o que Jorge Luis Borges escreveu em «Prólogo de Prólogos» sobre «Moby Dick» que «página a página, o relato aumenta até usurpar o tamanho do cosmo: a princípio o leitor pode supor que o seu tema é a vida miserável dos arpoadores de baleias; depois, que o tema é a loucura do capitão Ahab, ávido de perseguir e destruir a baleia branca; depois, que a baleia e Ahab e a perseguição que percorre os oceanos do planeta são símbolos e espelhos do Universo.»

4.5 stars

I definitely would not have read this had it not been for class, but I'm so glad I did. As often as it goes off on tangents about whaling and details I don't care about, somehow those chapters are short enough to not lose my attention entirely, and they always rounded back to a relevant point that made them integral to the story rather than background information. I think Ishmael and Ahab are two tremendously developed characters. I'm eager to delve into my research on this book because there's a lot of interesting and relevant themes to work with.

One last thing: Starbuck deserved better. That's all I'll say.

I first read Moby-Dick as part of a college English course, and it is true that being guided by a professor through this book is a great advantage in appreciating it's beauty. Melville's use of symbolism is not always obvious, and the course I took uncovered interesting symbols that Melville skillfully built into the text; my professor also explained Melville's personal history, as a sailor and as a man. Later, I read other works by Melville, and in Billy Budd in particular, Melville worked in the Pagan symbolism of the Celtic god Bud-dugre, also known as Budd. In any of Melville's books there is a lot going on at many levels, but almost none of it is obvious, nor did he mean it to be. Melville said to Hawthorne about Moby-Dick, "I have written a very wicked book". As we now know, Melville was almost certainly bisexual, in light of which Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg makes more sense than it did to me when I first read the book, but one can also read the bedfellows scene with the humor which Melville also intended. Speaking of which there is plenty of humor in Moby-Dick, from the argument between the Quaker owners over Ishmael's "lay", to the cook preaching to the sharks, to the various exploits of Flask and Stubb. In a more dramatic vein, the sermon about Jonah by Father Mapple is a highlight of the book, in my opinion.

Others have noted the strange "digression" chapters in the book, like Cetology, etc. My professor said to skip them and keep to the main narrative, and that was good advice for a first read, although I did read them later. It is hard for us in the 21st Century to understand how authors in the 19th Century wrote for their audiences; before the internet, before TV, before movies, there were only books for entertainment, so readers wanted their books long, and digressions were welcome because they added to the length of the narrative. Remember that the main contemporaneous criticism of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, arguably the greatest eulogy ever written, was that it was too short by an hour or so.

The story of Ahab gripped me from the start; perhaps because I knew a man like him, but his steely determination is strangely attractive, at least to me, as when Starbuck tries to "swerve him" from his crazy pursuit of the White Whale:

“Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!”

Or his outburst "Who's over me? By god, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!" Poor Starbuck, the good man, borne along, tethered to the obsessed Ahab: as a reader you sympathize with him more than any other character because his goodness is clear:

"At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not though high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:

"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye! - Tell me not of thy tiered-teethed sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe."'

Such writing! The many beautiful passages, heartrending passages, timeless passages in this book are worth the work to find them. At last, Ahab really is the "grand, ungodly, godlike man" as the stranger describes him in the beginning, and if this isn't great literature, I'm not sure what is.

If Moby-Dick had a more discernable plot than a tightly crafted short story or novela, I wasn't able to detect it. With that thought in mind, I highly recommend chapters 133 through 135. I suggest readers should feel guilt-free to skip most of this book and read only these final three chapters.

Even given the absence of plot throughout most of this book, I still consider Moby-Dick both an impressive work and an important contribution to the fields of history, anthropology, linguistics, and, perhaps, biology.

I read forty-nine chapters the old-fashioned way, then switched to an audiobook. Frank Muller did a commendable job of narration, although I will admit to briefly falling asleep on one occasion.

So... I just finished it a couple of days ago and pretty much everything else pales in comparison.

About three hundred pages in, it was already in my top ten favorite novels of all time, and it didn't disappoint (much)as I continued reading. I actually deliberately drew out getting to the ending so I could savor the last few hundred pages or so. Damn. What a doozy.

What can really be said about this book which hasn't been said before?

A couple of major points that bear mentioning...

* It's dense. The language is deeply referential, complex, allusive and encyclopedic, poetic in almost an archaic way. You have to slow down a bit and reread the sentences in order to get their maximum impact. You can read it, it just means that if you really want to get the full experience, you should kick the can more slowly down the road.
I'd heard about the whaling chapters getting tedious and academic, and to a good degree they are, but honestly I didn't find that form of density that bad a reading experience. Melville's pretty good at keeping that part of the writing suitably compelling and informative, even if you're not terribly interested in the digressions into the specific subject matter.

* It's funny. there's a sort of slapstick humor in places, some rough and curt observations and one-liners. Ishmael, to the extent that he is in fact the narrator (more of a cypher, really, as things wear on) is a picaresque for sure. I found him charming, somewhat goofy, adventuresome, good natured, and rather high-spirited, which was a bit of a surprise. I liked him quite a bit. I also noticed part of the way through that he doesn't actually 'say' his name is Ishmael, he merely suggests (or demands) that you call him by that name. Interesting, no? And there's some back story on him but really not very much. You draw some inferences by his speech and his circumstances and his range of references, but like I said he's more or less ephemeral.

* It's gay. Not in that annoying, overly-politicized kind of reading, but there is a strong, rather overt current of homosexual...uh...tension? preoccupation? Interest? I'd heard some sarcastic remarks before about the kind of interaction between Ishmael and Queequeg in the beginning, when they meet by accident in a room at an inn, but I was struck by how sort of undisguised it was. I have no issue or particular disapproval with it, morally or whatever, it was just surprising how unexplained and irreducible the homoerotic overtones were. There's an entire chapter, much later on, which can, in all honesty, be referred to as a kind of circle-jerk. I'm not kidding. Andrew Delbanco, in his brilliant and eloquent biography, quotes one of Melville's critics on this particular point. It's not hyperbole.

O and, for what it's worth, there are no women whatsoever. Not even as cameos, at least that I noticed. It's a bit of a shame, actually, since this would have been interesting. But yeah, not a woman in sight- occasionally the family of one character or another might be mentioned, but nobody makes a flesh and blood appearance.

* It's postmodern as all hell. The references to external texts are heavy, complex, and do create a sort of meta-reading experience of its own. Ishmael is a sort of neo-Platonist, it's true, and this is represented at various points. But nothing in this book is left to cool for very long, part of the tale involves his deep reckoning with that very philosophy, as applied to the perils and concrete realities of the world as experienced in an everyday way. The awareness on the part of Ishmael (and Melville himself, more on that in a moment) of his predecessors, literary and historical, is profound and constantly at play.

Melville has a very interesting and difficult balancing act in terms of the narrative voice. Ishmael is the host for about a third or more and then it sort of becomes an invisible, 'Melvillean' voice leading you along. Not to mention the deepening presence of Ahab as the story starts to heat up. He definitely becomes the central voice for much of the narrative and textual fabric of the story. And then there's quite a few extremely de-centered, Joycean passages where you aren't exactly sure what is real and what is taking place in a kind of polyphonic ensemble of dislocated, more or less decontextualized voices yammering on about god-knows-what. And then there's the profound, unsettling meditation on the very whiteness of the whale itself....

* It's American, all right. I wouldn't necessarily want to pin the Great American Novel medal on it, much as I loved it. I'm not convinced that there is, or can be such a thing. It is essentially an American novel, though, and so much of our national identity is contained herein.

There's the concern for the everyman, the relentless obsession with personal freedom and individuality, the drive for economic power and mercantile processes, the sort of omniscient Darwinism that pervades the ostensibly democratic structures and mentality of the participants- I know Ahab's autocratic, that could hardly be in doubt, but he's not the only one giving orders, even if he's the top dog. There's a really deep sense of raw nature as an all-against-all on the boat itself, besides the fact that they are in direct competition with other ships for a possibly very lucrative and by no means guaranteed payday.
There's some very interesting and complicated racial dynamics, and the almost unconscious tacit acceptance of charisma as the main selling point for political power.

The religious overtones are heavy and loaded in all possible meanings of the term, though, as Harold Bloom is wont to say, America (or Ishmael or Ahab or the narrator Melville himself as he appears perhaps separately from the author-ness) is, very much like the Pequod, obsessed with religion, even thinks its religious, though it is not itself a religious country. And if there's any religion as a guiding light, it's decidedly of the Old Testament kind. The god of Moby-Dick ain't handing out any loaves and fishes, that's for sure.

* Ahab's Ahab. He was everything I thought he'd be and more. I was actually impressed by what a complex character he turned out to be. I knew he'd be monomaniacal but there's some very interesting, tender moments he has both alone and with others which I was not expecting.

* It's...gasp...Shakespearean. You know how Shakespeare's language has that same rich density, that chiming music of cognition where the metaphors stream by like scales of notes as the characters soliloquize themselves into being? Yeah. It's got that. And there's even, as the story continues, quite a few stage directions, to boot. Melville had freshly discovered Shakespeare right around the time he'd begun work on it and it shows.

A friend of mine had read it recently and we agreed that Moby-Dick sort of makes it so that you almost can't really read any novels after it. In its wake, if you will. I personally am still feeling the reverberations.

It's like an atom bomb for your brain.

If that's the kind of thing you think you might enjoy, by all means please do give it a whirl.

It is worth remembering that the book is not really a story. The plot of the novel consists of only four to six chapters of the actual book, the rest being the main character's observations about the natural history of whales, the whaling industry, religion, basically, like Don Quixote.

“Call me Ishmael.”

– OK, even those who have not read Melville’s words, know about this iconic beginning. Why Ishmael? Why not.

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began”

– This is first and foremost a novel about the sea and men upon the sea. Melville, like Conrad, spent a fair amount of time on a boat and his prose has that sea going quality about it. He has stood mid-watches and he has stood on the deck in heavy seas and he’s not pretending to know.

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian”

– Like my good friend Apatt observed, this is also a book about friendship and loyalty. There is loyalty amongst the crew, some taken by Ahab’s charismatic leadership, but more importantly, there is a strong loyalty between Ishmael and Queequeg.

"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

– Starbuck’s classic protest to Ahab sets a tone for the book. Is this capitalism? Is this business? Nope, this is revenge, this is an atavistic, almost pagan quest for unreasonable vengeance. Here is where Melville earns his star. He spends a lot of time describing the economics and logistics about whaling, and then throws it out the porthole. This is something else.

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations.”

– Like Milton’s Satan, Melville’s Ahab is the most interesting character. Moby-Dick without Ahab is just a book about whaling and a hundred and fifty years later we would not be talking about it. Ahab is Conrad’s Kurtz, and Ishmael is his Marlowe, he is the Hollow Man, the one who has disregarded both his modernity and his soul.

A modern classic, the great American novel, all that and Gregory Peck. And of course it inspired John Bonham's memorable drum solo

I confess, I had such high expectations for this classic and was sadly disappointed. What was I missing? Maybe a second read will reveal its appeal and respectful standing in literature?

3.5 stars.

I finally finished this behemoth of a book, in just under a year! I did in fact take around a 10 month or so break, so that is understandable, but I'm so glad I persevered and completed it. Moby Dick, although unfuriating and challenging at the best of times, is well worth the read.

The storyline generally follows a sailor called Ishmael, who along with new found friend and harpooner Queequeg, gets a job aboard the Peyquod, a whaling ship manned by the insane Captain Ahab. The crew think they are just going on a typical whaling expedition, but in reality Ahab has bigger prizes in mind - killing the famous white whale Moby Dick who took his leg from him years before.

I think the main reason it took me so long to finish this book was that I picked it up at a bad time. I picked it up last September when I already had a lot of books (quite hefty ones at that) which I had challenged myself to read in the year. So I got 250 pages in and had to put it down in favour of others. And then the months passed and I was nervous to pick it up again because 1) this book is dense as hell and 2) it's really long. I would even argue too long, but that's just my personal opinion.

There is a lot to love in Moby Dick - the action sequences are impeccable, you learn a lot about whaling and the actual procedures behind procuring oil, spermacetti, etc., and there are some genuinely hilarious moments. The book is littered with innuendo which I found incredibly fun to read (although that might just be my immature side coming out). However, what slowed this read down for me, and made me have to knock it down a half star, was the AMOUNT of telling, rather than showing. There are a lot of info-dump chapters in Moby Dick, and often I felt that they took me out of the flow and rhythm of the story. At times they were interesting, and at times they were tied in with the actual events taking place with the characters, but sometimes I felt like they were just there to bulk up the page count and display Melville's vast knowledge of whales and whaling. It definitely was a bit of a road block for me.

Saying that, I would probably read this book again. Not anytime soon of course, but maybe a few years down the line, because I think you could get a lot more out of it through subsequent readings. I would definitely recommend this book to most people, but just be aware that it is a time-consuming read and it is dense. But it's definitely worth it in my opinion.

I shouldn’t like Moby Dick. It’s modern reputation is almost wholly a product of Academia who rediscovered it in the first half of the 20th century and promoted it as the greatest of all American novels. This despite the fact that it was a literary failure when first published that quickly went out of print and was forgotten in its own time.

I usually hate the books and authors that Academia uniquely enshrines - I’m looking at you, James Joyce, T.S. Elliott, and David Foster Wallace. It seems that the primary reason they elevate such books is to create a high brow canon that requires a literary high priesthood, gatekeepers to educate the hoi plloi on what is sophisticated and in good taste. So, by all rights, I should hate Moby Dick.

The fact that I actually love this odd, sprawling novel surprised the hell out of me. It captured me from its famous opening sentence, ”Call me Ishmael,” to its Biblical final line, ”And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Between those lines are unforgettable characters (Queequeg, Starbuck, Captain Ahab) adventure, symbolism, morality tale, chapters long asides on the minutia of whaling, critique of 19th century America, a tale of loss, alienation, and nihilistic monomania, and, most surprisingly, laugh out loud humor. It reads like a modern novel (whaling minutia chapters aside) as it has none of the sentimentality that was prevalent in 19th century literature. And most refreshing, it is totally accessible to the modern reader with no need for explanation from the academic high priesthood.

Moby Dick can be intimidating. Its reputation, length, and many digressive chapters on the details of 19th century whaling are enough to put many readers off. But its rewards far outweigh its challenges. I’ve now read it twice and loved it both times. If you haven’t, give it a try. You may be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

the best opening line ever! & hey, one can always skip some of the whale pages...