In the words of Ed Hillary, returning to base camp from summiting Everest, "We knocked the bastard off," and fairly quickly too.

So, what is there to say about this book that has had so much already written about it?
Did I enjoy reading it? I am unsure... I enjoyed some parts a lot, and in equal measure, there were parts I detested. But I have probably jumped ahead...

I am pretty sure I made an attempt at reading this before, but that memory is so vague I have not marked it so on GR. I know I never finished it, and I can't be sure if I even read enough pages to depart from Nantucket... but that is already quite an investment.

I recently read Nathanial Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, and Moby Dick is obviously referenced fairly heavily. That book was a five star read, cramming in so much whaling and nautical history into a comparatively short book, and it reminded me that Moby Dick was not a book I had successfully completed... so I thought I better tackle it. This book is similar, in that it includes far, far more than the narrative of the whale hunt.

Having recently injured my Achilles tendon, I have had the pleasure, without too much guilt, of lounging about on the couch reading. This allowed me to wallow in Moby Dick more than I would normally have been able to justify...

So to the parts I liked:
- This isn't 'just' a novel. In fact large tracts if it don't fit into a fiction category at all. It is part scientific treatise, part history of whaling, part history of other random things, part choreographed stage play, part an exploration of mythology and of course part epic nautical adventure. Not only that, but it was all chopped in together.
- So I enjoyed significantly more the scientific and whaling history aspects that the others, but I found the hard transitions between various aspects were far less successful than those in Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea.
- Ishmael's narration - I have put this as a part I like, but it isn't without it's challenges. For the most part I enjoyed the narration of the story, but there were aspects told that he could not have had knowledge of. It is also ironic that Ishmael is such a minor character in the story itself, and for those who have read it  the only one to survive!
- Queequeg, as a character was great, a South-Seas Polynesian, from fictional Kokovoko, via New Zealand as described by Ishmael. His bromance with Ishmael was hilarious. P45, "Better [to] sleep with sober cannibal than a drunken Christian"... ha.

And the parts I struggled with:
- Chapter 9, The Sermon. This just about curtailed my reading of this novel. If for some unknown reason, you are reading my review and considering the novel... do yourself a favour and feel free to skip over this chapter of pain.
- The regular changes in style left me, at times, baffled as to what I had just read. It was in places such dense stream-of-consciousness writing that it was practically unmanageable.
- There were whole tracks of text that I couldn't reconcile as being relevant to the narrative. Baffling and almost unintelligible pages... the denser they became the more my eyeballs turned back in their sockets...
- The convoluted repetition got to me too - describing a single event two or three times with different words - just move on already, Melville, you are using up pages!
- Bulkington - I mean, why? Near the start we are given a whole explanation of him and how he will be Ishmael's companion on the Pequod, yet other than one (very) brief mention, he doesn't feature again in the entire novel!
- Anyone who has read my reviews already knows my analysis is always pretty simple. I am not good with analogies; I despise psychological assessments; I don't identify with spiritual aspects. There was too much of this for me.

On balance I have given four stars, as the parts I enjoyed have outweighed the aspects I didn't enjoy. The encyclopedic examination of whaling and whales was fantastic and added another layer on what I learned from Philbrick.

Wanna know a secret? Lean over here and I’ll tell you: This is the first time I’ve read Moby Dick. No lie. 43 years old, never read it. That assignment in high school? Skipped it. Faked the report. Thank you, Cliff Notes. By that, I mean the guy named Cliff in my English class. He owed me a favor. A whale of a favor . . . And college? Bachelor’s degree in Humanities – I had to have read Moby Dick, right? Wrong. Just snippets. Excerpts. Then, feeling the guilt of being an educated American who had not read the book, I sat down to finally read it. This was, oh, about twenty years ago or so, I don’t rightly remember.
 
I started. But I didn’t finish. Why not? Because the book had a reputation, a monstrous reputation. It was big, boring, and scary, at least that’s what I was told. While I was reading comic books, fantasies, and role-playing game rulebooks in any spare time I had, my friends were reading Moby Dick. Or they had read it already and they were brooding on it. For years. I saw what that book had done to them. It didn't look very pretty from the outside.
 
But I have an addictive personality. Sometimes, I just can’t stop myself from reading. My curiosity – well, it gets me into a lot of trouble. And so it was that I was led, nay, possessed by some evil entity beyond myself (or maybe it was just embarrassment) to finally crack the spine and eat the marrow of, er, I mean, to read, yes, read what is considered by many to be Melville’s masterpiece.
 
Even then, I kept it a secret. I’m a multiple-book-at-a-time-reader (why does admitting that make me feel dirty?), so I’ve conveniently used the cloak of a few other books (even one, ironically, that involved whales) to disguise the fact that I’ve been covertly reading Moby Dick alongside these others. I know. I’m a creep, a literary lurker. Some kind of intellectual pervert. I can hardly help myself.
 
So it’s confession time. Time to repent and face up to reality. And the reality is: I really liked Moby Dick. It’s not nearly the daunting Leviathan that some led me to believe it was. Nor was it as boring as my little dalliances within its excerpts had initially indicated. No, actually, it was good. Really good.

And the book is not as "heavy" as you might think, at least not all the time. Melville’s sense of humor comes through, from time to time, in the book, and is rather endearing. Here, for example, he describes a painting of a whale and a narwhale appearing in the 1807 version of “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature”:
 
I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale
looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale,
one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth
century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon
any intelligent public of schoolboys.
 
There’s a sort of learned snarkiness in the narrator’s voice, though it’s not sharply critical. The kind of thing you’d appreciate around a table drinking tea with close friends, rather than the public humor of a stand-up comedian. This sense of talking with a (very erudite) friend makes the book “warm” in just the right spots, such as the point where Ishmael is getting to know Queequeg a little better than he'd like to. In time the narrator’s accepting attitude help us to accept not only Queequeg, but Ishmael himself, as well. We learn to trust him as our narrator.

Granted, there are moments, like the exhaustive (and exhausting) taxonomy of whales that tried the nerves (the optic nerves, in particular), and, yes, the language is archaic and even a bit esoteric at times. The alliteration can get a little tedious, too, even for a Dr. Seuss fanatic like me, as in this sentence:
 
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one
serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like
scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings,
made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a
silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white
bubbles at the bow. 

But Melville – first off, the guy has chops. He can write a great sentence.

Secondly, he weaves dimestore philosophy throughout almost seamlessly, and I love works with a bit of the philosophical in them. Even in the descriptions of decapitated whale’s heads, the narrator waxes philosophical:
 
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there?
It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles
in the forehead seem now faded away.  I think his broad brow
to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative
indifference as to death.  But mark the other head's expression.
See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw.  Does not this whole head seem
to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death?
This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale,
a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

Another example comes to mind, as the narrator holds a rope tied around his friend, Queequeg, who is rather busy working on a whale carcass in the water, all the time trying to avoid being bitten by the school of sharks that is feeding on the body atop which the poor laborer is walking. I love the implications of this "monkey rope", how we are, as humans in society, tied together and dependent on one another. There’s a simultaneous fear and warmth in the trust implied thereby. That tightrope between fear and warmth seems to be a comfortable spot for Melville. Not an easy trick!

And third, his characters are incredibly detailed, alive, even. Take, for instance, this masterful description of the genesis of Ahab’s hatred toward Moby Dick:

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant
rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment.
Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but
given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity;
and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably
but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.
Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for
long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched
together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary,
howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed
soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.
That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter,
that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain
from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was
a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover
intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace
him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock.
In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales.
And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship,
with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics,
and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind
him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark
den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore
that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm
orders once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness
was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on.

I find the crazed prophet Gabriel of the ship Jeroboam to be fascinating, as well. In fact, all the certifiably crazy people in the story (Gabriel, Ahab and, later, Pip) are fascinating in their ability to lift the reader beyond the mundane with their mad, eloquent ravings. I’d love to write Gabriel's full story, or a similar one. Maybe someday . . . is there such a thing as “Moby Dick fanfic?"

Now, Melville’s seemingly erratic jump from 3rd to 1st person, back and forth, as well as his diversions into stage directions and drama would be considered the greatest taboo by many of the big-name book publishers today. Inconsistent narration? Crazy! Metafiction? No one will want to read that!
 
But they did. And they do. The popularity of Moby Dick attests to that. But if Melville were to submit his manuscript today, few agents would take it. “Too experimental,” they’d say, “try the small presses”. And some obscure small press, run from a kitchen table in a suburb on a shoestring budget, would eventually take it and publish it right into nothingness. Eventually, as word spread among a cult of readers, one of the larger presses might note that the book was getting some notoriety and ask for sales trends. “This is a whale of a tale,” they’d say as their pupils assumed the shape of dollar signs, “how did we ever miss it?”
 
If it was a whale, it would have bitten their corporate leg off.

Maybe that's what makes this book so good. It's a tough read. It requires some stamina. You'll probably need to grab a dictionary from time to time. Some parts will read incredibly slow and you'll need to re-read them. Others will be over before you know it and you'll need to re-read them. This is not a book for the casual reader any more than the Pequod's quest was a casual fishing trip off the coast. This book is deep water. But like any challenge that requires great effort, the results are worth it. Some might consider this read a quest in and of itself, even memorializing their participation in the quest. I don't blame them. Moby Dick is a sort of readers' rite of passage. Now I can say, with some sense of pride, that I am one of the initiated, forever baptized in the depths along with Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubbs, and all the rest. I know these people, or I knew them. I have smelled the blood of whales, the salt of the sea, tasted the iron of the harpoon, stood atop the mast and taken in the rolling immensity of the sea, seen the white whale rushing up from the watery dark toward my boat. I have served my time on the Pequod. And I say, welcome aboard!

Moby Dick by Herman Melville
https://youtu.be/EGhRGF22E1w

"Novelist" is too small a term for Melville--he's some kind of shaggy bard, writing rhapsodic yet precise, musuclar yet dulcet Elizabethan-tinged English at the midcentury high noon of "realism." For the time and place, the book and the man are uniquely American products, such as only America's social fluidity, untamed confusion of forms and sheer what-the-fuck randomness could produce: a sketchily educated scion of a declined old family goes to sea as a common sailor, comes back, immerses himself autodidactically in Shakespeare and Browne and the Bible, and produces this awesome stew of sermons, whaling lore, zoology, abtuse philosophical speculation, outlandish allusion, terrifying metaphysical pessimism and, above all, Hamlet-and-Lear-grade tragic characterization. Then his career gradually peters out, newspapers delcare him insane, a son kills himself, he takes a lowly job as a customs inspector at the port of New York while devoting his remaining literary energy to privately published poetry and homoerotic fiction that will be found in a trunk long after his barely-noted death. Was this guy really on the same planet as Balzac and Flaubert and George Eliot?

And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour,
is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Melville employs a fragment of Job 1:15 for the epigram of the epilogue: "...and I only am escaped alone to tell thee." In the same way, the reader, after 625 pages of pure sublime masterwork, escapes alone to tell others of the experience. And it is a large, profound experience. As Melville says himself, through his surrogate Ishmael, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme" (497). Having found success with his first two novels, n  Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Lifen and n  Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seasn, and then failure with his third, n  Mardi and a Voyage Thithern, a dense philosophical work, Melville seems to have found the Aristotelian golden mean in the Genesis of American literature: the mighty n  Moby-Dick or, The Whalen.

I avoided the book for a long time, daunted as I was by its heft and, well, age and subject matter. Yet, as Thomas C. Foster points out in his book n  How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Linesn, it was really my own age that was the impasse: "...[Moby-Dick] succeeds by rules of narrative that not many people can grasp (especially at the age of seventeen or twenty, when most of us get fouled in its lines)" (243). Indeed, a book like this makes tall demands of its readership. For example, one should at least be conversational about the n  Tanakh: The Holy Scripturesn, especially in its King James translation; one should have at least a basic familiarity with the great Shakespearean tragedies and its chief figures (Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth); and one should have an understanding of the major metaphysical arguments before and of Melville's time (Hume versus Kant; free will versus determinism, etc.). But, really, above all, the n  King James Bible Touchn is paramount. As the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye has it in his book n  The Great Code: The Bible and Literaturen, "...a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads" (xii).

Melville's great book suffers from the same social stigma as so many others, the Bible included. Along with, say, n  The Scarlet Lettern, n  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnn, and n  Uncle Tom's Cabinn, people have heard so much about the books, that they feel they have already read them. This sentiment leads to Italo Calvino's cheeky definition of a classic in his book n  Why Read the Classics?n as being a book that one is always "re-reading," never reading for the first time. To be sure, this can also be because one is embarrassed to admit that one has not read some great work or another before. For myself, I didn't read Moby-Dick until 8 years ago, at age 24, in grad school. And even then, my professor didn't do much to give me a leg up when she said, "I'm sorry to do this, but, you'll have to do a close-reading of Moby-Dick; there's no way around it." Luckily, though I didn't quite take to it on the first reading as I did on this second reading, the experience was peculiar and never left me. When I attempted to negatively criticize it, my arguments were glaringly thin. Harold Bloom, in n  The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Agesn sums it up best when he says, "When you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations" (3).

In general, it is the opening sentence (featured on a coffee mug of famous opening sentence I bought at the NYPL) and the mad Ahab out to catch the white whale that people know of the book. Scarcely much more, save for maybe the ambiguity of the dynamic between Ishmael and Queequeg. To know only these two elements of the main plot of the book is to know very little of its bulk, for these takeaways can be gleaned from the first chapter and last three chapters. There are still 131 other chapters! Another stigma that has attached itself to the book like a barnacle to a whale is that it is bloated with outdated whaling lore and purports to be an encyclopedia of whaling. Like most stigmas, there is truth to this, but allow me to assert my argument for undertaking such a reading project as this without resorting to abridgment.

Spending, let's say, a month of your life reading Moby-Dick is not to spend a month reading only one book. It is to spend a month reading through a library: "There are certain books that, in themselves, are an ideal library. Examples: Moby-Dick...." (269, n  A Reader on Readingn). Again, like the Bible (which is also considered a library), this book is not a novel; it is composed of plays, poems, prose poems, narrative, essays, scholarly treatises, philosophy, theology, and more. Melville displays his acumen as a sort of polyglot of genres. Where Cervantes gives us interpolated stories, Melville gives us interpolated essays. Through Ishmael, we get a genius's thoughts on all manner of the popular and the esoteric (Melville was considerably well read) synthesized into the metaphor of the human pushing to the brink of madness to capture an elusive whale. The more I think about this major theme of the book, the more I realize how inclusive, how universal it is. Yet, it is distinctly American. Whereas Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles, Ahab looks to himself to obtain his goal.

Approaching the book in thirds is a good way to plan your reading project. The first third introduces the principal characters and sets us off on the Pequod on Christmas Day (i.e. Christ's traditional birth date). The second third gives us the weight of scholarly discourse on whaling, but Melville rewards the alert reader with constant dips into the poetic and philosophical modes. Finally, the last third, the extended climax of the book, pays off with dividends for the efforts of the reader. This is a book best read at a slow pace. I recommend no more than 20 pages a day, in order to properly ingest and absorb the glut of its offerings.

The undeniable standout character is, of course, that black hole Ahab, into which everything on its event horizon is pulled and out of which nothing escapes. Melville transcends himself with Ahab. The Shakespearean soliloquies (for even when he speaks to others, he is really just speaking to himself) take up the torch passed from Shakespeare to Milton and now to Melville. Ahab captures the viscera of the American spirit in a way that Ishmael just cannot, clinging to Reason above all. Where Ishmael says "give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals," Ahab, in the face of death, proclaims, "to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee" (12, 623).

I glance through all of my marginalia, Post-it notes, highlighting, etc., and I am overwhelmed with all there is to say of this great book. Perhaps one day I will set to the task of distilling all of these notes and thoughts into a long essay (really, only another book will come closer to doing it justice), but--alas--I must bring this "review" to a close. Suffice it to say this: In Job 41:1, God says to Job, "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?" Melville's Ahab answers with a mad, "Yes, I can." Who would not want to read a book written about the man who, unlike Job, set out to defy God's limitation on mankind? A mighty theme indeed.

first introduction
I read years ago about a monster marathon reading of Moby Dick in the USA, volunteers would each read a chapter aloud and they would get through the book in maybe two and a half days, where they read I do not remember, not in Nantucket or New Bedford I think, but probably in New England - which gives you better odds of finding such a reading than Ahab had in searching for the White Whale. Surprisingly such readings haven't become a major spectator sport, nor even a matter of rivalry between towns and states, perhaps one day in the future...

second introduction
many years ago, but not quite four score years and ten, I read Moby Dick in the penguin edition, one of those in which the introduction is itself an epic ,fit to murder an honest reader and the endnotes virtually as long as the novel again - I felt obliged to read with one finger in the story and another in the notes and I flopped awkwardly from one to the other. This edition that I have read now, has all the cruel disadvantages of no over helpful introduction and no endnotes which explain everything that you never needed to know, and so as a consequence is a much easier book to read.

might be a review
reading the final pages I was suddenly reminded of the story of Saint Hubertus - man hunts stag, stag turns on man with message from God, man renounces hunting to become saint. Moby Dick is almost the same story except in a more old testament way, the hunter instead chooses to ignore or misunderstand all the warnings he is given. And as we are reminded in the book, ultimately the dogs licked King Ahab's blood (1 Kings 22). But I am getting entangling in my own line, let me cut myself free. Saint Hubertus' story was also mine own, for I turned my back on the glory of the White Whale until it came with a heavy splash after me and swallowed me whole even as Jonah was swallowed in days of old.

much more likely to be a review
Apparently, or so Wikipeadia tells me and what faith I put in that I dare not publically say, E.M. Forster wrote Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem, I believe however, that I concur to the utmost with that opinion, for me it is one of the great books of the world - a proud and vain belief as I shall certainly never read but a small percentage (if at all countable) of the world's books, and no less foolishly I believe it is The Great American Novel perhaps because slippery with whale blubber, it warns non-Americans about race and religion and society in the USA, it might be the great novel of capitalism (or Marxism) or even the great novel about what man does to the environment and our fellow creatures (but I repeat myself, as I said the great novel of capitalism or Marxism, reminding me of Melville's story The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids).

All novels set aboard ships immediately ring symbolic bells for the reader (if they are attended to is another question - and not attending to the toiling of symbolism is a big theme in the book). The ship and it's crew can be taken as representing society, it is the ship of state (not to be confused with a stately ship), a ship of fools, an Odyssey - though in this case the end point of the voyage is not Ithaca but a more final resting place, a Quest not for the Golden Fleece but for the golden oil or a quest for something else, vengeance or self-destruction. It is a surprisingly straight retelling of the Biblical story of Ahab set in Melville's own times and translated to his 'modern' setting. In the Bible God brings down King Ahab by means of false prophecy, here Captain Ahab plugs his ears to the siren call of true prophecy clinging instead to the Delphic riddle of a Parsi (not that there is anything intrinsically wrong in harkening to the fortune telling of Parsis  though I am compelled to say that soothsayers of other nations are available, a whaling ship makes use of all talents we are told). We believe what we want to, and when that leads us into disaster maybe that is just what we want.

Marvellously, the book proceeds like a whale, diving below water and swimming unseen, breaking the surface and turning on the reader suddenly. The eponymous whale is introduced to us through his actions and legends, but we barely meet him and in person only at the very end of the story, that he consists of massive symbolic power we are explicitly told, but what he symbolises is open to the reader to decide. The big old whale could of course just be a big old whale and not an incarnation of God or an agent of Divine will. The burden of symbolism and foreshadowing ought to be enough to make the poor Pequod capsize before she leaves harbour, but she bobs away prettily partly because of Melville's digressions on whaling and whales. Encyclopaedic diversions, which distract us from the vexing question of how in an Divine universe does a person distinguish between the false and the true prophets.

While Moby Dick's narrator is saved by a comic inversion, the novel itself was not and sank only to be dredged up and revived after the author's death and glancing at reviews you can see why, it's a big novel full of disparate elements. It is unconventional in almost every way. In the updates I made I mentioned how a couple of lines reminded me of the poem Invictus, it is unlikely there is any relationship between the two, but culturally I would say that Invictus is a thoroughly Victorian piece asserting the triumph of the will, the heroic individual able to stand defiant if not o'ercome all difficulties. Moby Dick is the complete opposite, the heroic individual is Ahab, his triumphant will leads to death, admiration of his passion and obedience to his orders leads to lots of deaths and the novel questions the notion of I am the Captain of my soul, the master of my fate right from start - the narrator instead tells us who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about - however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way - either in a physical or metaphysical point of view that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades and be content (p.5) and the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it (p.5) , Ahab is the captain of the ship, but who is the captain of Ahab? Ahab himself denies responsibility - I don't think, I just feel - he tells us, but Ahab feels differently to other ship's captain's in similar situations, the solution then lies elsewhere: predestination maybe, fate perhaps, psychology even. From a broader point of view we are also shown that the whaling industry is both fundamental to Victorian society, but at the same time it's irreverent inversion. The married ship's officers are almost perpetually absent from their marriage beds, pausing there barely long enough to reproduce, the ship itself an idyll, a foretaste of heaven the narrator imagines when he participates in squeezing sperm on deck, gazing dreamily into his shipmate's eyes unable anymore to distinguish their sperm softened hands. Men of many nations and diverse faiths sail as one crew in an age that insisted on firm divisions between faiths, nations and races. The Narrator is married to the Polynesian Harpooner even before they join the ship, which they do as a couple, in this world a same-sex relationship is as normally abnormal as everything else. Society may be built upon whale oil, but the whaling business turns life on its head.

Perhaps to try to make something of Moby Dick to try to find meaning meaning is the last joke the book has at the reader's expense, turning the reader into Captain Ahab, a poor monomanic in pursuit of a dreadful White Whale. In which case just remember Bartleby's philosophy: I would prefer not to.

One of my book clubs is reading this right now. I read it a few years ago and was not yet ready for a re-read. And, honestly, since I didn't care for it much, I am not sure that I ever will.

In looking at other reviews and comments made, it appears like people generally enjoy this book. From what I remember of it, that is a little hard for me to understand. But, I am certainly glad that people have enjoyed it more than I did. Maybe I read a different book?

What it really came down to was 1/5 story . . . 4/5 info about whales, whaling, whales, blubber, whales, harpoons, whales . . .

The 1/5 that was story was pretty good. The rest got a bit old for me after a while. When I was not getting bored, some of Melville's writing was clever and entertaining, but not enough to carry a 500+ page novel.

Just my opinion - again, glad that many others have enjoyed it! Maybe someday I will be convinced to try it again.

“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?

It's about a whale eventually. Before that it's a gay romantic comedy. "In our hearts’ honeymoon," says Ishmael, "lay I and Queequeg – a cosy, loving pair." If you never made it past page 100, because you were assigned this in high school and it was boring, you might wonder where the whale even is. Where's this majestic tome everyone's yelling about?

About a quarter in, captain Ahab shows up raving about Moby-Dick and the book takes this intense lurch into legend, and it feels like a pretty radical change of direction here. Ahab completely takes over, a character of Shakespearean primal force: "Ahab never thinks; he feels, feels, feels." Melville wasn't a careful planner at the best of times, but something else happened to him as he was writing this book, and here it is:


dude's name is literally "hawt & horny"

It's Nathaniel Hawthorne, the master of metaphor himself, whose relationship with Melville happened to coincide with the writing of Moby-Dick, and whose influence was so deep that Melville dedicated the book to him. So Melville's over here writing some kind of Robinson Crusoe slash fic, he meet cutes Hawthorne, and the next thing you know...


"to produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme"

It's Hawthorne who suggests to Melville that he's onto something with the whole whale thing - Hawthorne with his towering feel for metaphors - and here we have our mighty theme. And look, I know, you're not really used to whales being scary, right? You've gone on a whole boat trip just trying to get a peek at one. It surfaced for like two seconds 100 yards away and everyone was like ooh, so majestic. Pretending like whale watches aren't boring as fuck. You might feel the same way when Melville spends seven chapters in a row talking about the physiognomy of sperm whale heads. But he's doing a Jaws here, withholding the reveal, building suspense, and by the time the whale actually appears - 30 pages before the end - you know exactly what that head is capable of. What comes next is one of the best action scenes in literature.



Anyway the thing is that you gotta remember that in 1860, nobody knew shit about whales. Here - think of the whale like the rapper Ice Cube. Back in the NWA days, he created a scary, unknowable being of immense power and danger - a thing most of us had never seen in real life. Now he's recast himself as the star of "Are We There Yet?" He's cuddly now, and whales are on bumper stickers about saving. But once upon a time, both represented the implacable unknown.


the symbol you love to hate

The implacable unknown, and obsession, and futility and mortality and - and - like all the best metaphors, the whale means anything you need him to. Including, by the way, sperm. Because while the book becomes more mighty and more weighty, it never becomes any less gay at all. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long," Ishmael chants: "I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it!" Did your high school English teacher tell you to grow up, it's not that kind of sperm? It is that kind of sperm.

Top Ten Metaphors
10. Tigers (Borges & Cortazar, 1900s)
9. Scylla & Charybdis (Odyssey by Homer, 1000 BCE)
8. The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin, 1972)
7. Carrie (Stephen King, 1974)
6. The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne, 1850)
5. Voltron
4. Patrick Bateman (American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, 1991)
3. Gregor Samsa (Metamorphosis by Kafka, 1915)
2. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
1. Moby-Dick (Melville, 1851)

Hawthorne's influence made Moby-Dick deeper but not less gay, because Melville was in love with Hawthorne. “Whence come you, Hawthorne?" says one of his letters to him. "By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine.” And what happens next is Hawthorne moves across the state and they kindof stop talking. What happened? Did someone's wife catch them making out? Or was it just a crush? We have nothing to indicate Hawthorne's feelings; Melville burned all his letters. Maybe it was one-sided. Maybe Hawthorne was the white whale.

And that's one of the wonderful things about Moby-Dick for me: Melville has Trojan Horse'd the Great American Novel. Dude wrote DICK right on the cover of the book and no one got it. Still, to this day, my Penguin intro by Nathaniel Philbrick never once mentions how incredibly gay it is. Once again: It is that kind of sperm.

n  n

Look, you have this sense of Melville as ponderous, and he can be, but he's also funny as hell. He's like Shakespeare, who was a massive influence: if it feels like it might be wordplay, it always definitely is. Here's a thing he does right in the first chapter of the book, he goes

n
In this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim).

The Pythagorean maxim in question is "avoid beans;" Melville's making a fart joke. When he talks about squeezing sperm, how dumb do you think he'd have to be in order to not realize what he's writing? And furthermore Billy Budd, which doesn't even make sense if it isn't gay. And where I'm going here is that this isn't just a mighty book that sortof sounds gay: it's a mighty gay book. It's by a gay man. Even if we leave Hawthorne out of it, between Melville and Walt Whitman, the foundation of American literature is largely gay.

I mean, not to read too much into it. It's a book about a whale. But we should be clear that the whale is gay.

how can a book that's almost entirely set in the ocean be this dry :(

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale ~~  Herman Melville


4.5/5
Selected by Srđan for February 2022 Big Book Read

Herman Melville's  Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is one of those books I have an odd history with. I started it 15 years ago. The introduction to my edition was written by  Elizabeth Hardwick. In the first paragraph of her introduction, Hardwick gave away the entire plot of the novel. She assumed everyone knew what happens in n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen. I was quite upset by this, put the novel aside, and vowed to return to it in the future. Now, I skip the introductions in novels, and return to them when done reading the book.

I've made several half-hearted attempts to read n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen since then, but the ghost of  Elizabeth Hardwick still haunted me ...

15 years later ~~ a close friend selects n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen as my Big Book read for February of 2022. I’m excited. Then, thoughts of the evil  Elizabeth Hardwick slowly creep into my mind. For a bit, I thought my reading Moby Dick was cursed. Maybe I should wait another 15 years? No ~~  Elizabeth Hardwick be damned; I was not going to allow her to keep me from reading n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen once more.

I’m so glad I pushed on ~~ n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen is a brilliant book, and was not at all what I expected.



n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen is not an easy book to review. It is a difficult read at times. The narrative portions are few and far between. If you are looking for a straightforward narrative read, this book is not for you. I also believe it is crucial to read n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen as both a religious and philosophical text. The portions describing whales and whaling struck me as a theology of the divine white whale rather than mere biology and history. Yes, you can read of whale genitals without being overwhelmed by the underlying divinity of the subject ~~ but I felt while reading that Melville is probing eternity and divinity at a great depth. This was a very spiritual read.

We begin with perhaps the most famous line in all of English literature: n  Call me Ishmaeln …

It is Ishmael that leads us through the short narrative ~~ this is Ishmael's story ~~ not Ahab’s, as I had been lead to believe. The majority of chapters take us on a journey through whales, whaling, sailing, philosophy and theology. Melville's ability to guide his readers through both realistic and philosophical subjects is unparalleled to me as a reader. I marveled at the end of chapters when I realized how deep and thought provoking Melville's writing was.



n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen is an epic piece of literature on a par with n   The Iliadn, n   King Learn and n   The Book of Jobn. It is densely rich in language and structure, in character and story. In other words, n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen has it all.

Its account of a man vs. nature is a story that had never been told before with such grandeur. Yet, it equals other efforts by brilliant writers throughout history to portray humans confronting the unanswerable questions of existence.

Like Job grappling with the question of why bad things happen to good people ~~ why is there suffering is in the world.

Like Lear raging against the deterioration of the body, the betrayal of others and, even more, his own betrayals of himself.

Achilles ~~ the unconquerable, fights and dies because of a fatal flaw. Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and has sex with his mother because of the blindness that every human being is born with, the inability to know everything, to understand the consequences of actions.

As I said, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an epic piece of literature.



n  He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.n

Before concluding, I must address the underlying queer narrative in n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen.

n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen is filled with sexual imagery ~~ sailors massaging each other’s hands in a tub of sperm oil comes to mind. Melville's words are loaded with sensuality. This is most noticeable in the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. The evolution of their relationship throughout the book associates homosexuality with negative consequences. As the book progresses their interactions become increasingly more erotic. This negativity culminates with the death of Queequeg. Sadly, intimate relationships between men are negatively depicted by Melville. Perhaps this is done as a response to Melville's unrequited love for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville once wrote to Hawthorne. n  You have sunk your northern roots down into my southern soul.n



n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen is a book with so many layers; I'm certain I did not penetrated all of them ~~ I doubt anyone could with just one reading. It is a book that has found it way into my soul, where it will remain for a very long time. It belongs to that category of books that you are never finished with even when you finish it. In the end, n   Moby-Dick; or, The Whalen pierced my soul, and its harpoon stuck.