This is a curious and unwieldy book. At times (and too frequently) it reads like the more excruciatingly detailed scenes of Robinson Crusoe; at others the zany songs, goofy scenes, and curious characters prove Pynchon and DFW to be no pioneers in their lighthearted pursuits. The descriptive prose occasionally builds into an alliterative tornado where form, content, and raw urgency combined to leave me buzzed and page corner-bending. There’s a staggering amount of wisdom dressed up in whale-speak and ship-speak, easily justifying the frequency with which this book is taught and revisited. The dialogue and soliloquies are reminiscent of (and well-nigh the equal to) Shakespeare: the rhythm of speech, if not technically similar, certainly conjures up the Bard and, regardless of the accurateness of my observation here, offers exquisite aesthetic delights. Indeed, this is the first book I've tried reading/whispering aloud in parts since moving through Paradise Lost earlier in the year.

After a jocular commencement full of quaint homoeroticism and ominous adumbrations, the feverish intensity of the story picks up with Ahab’s declaration of his quest to find and kill the white whale. Not only does this scene kick the plot into motion, but it also signals the beginning of Melville’s flirtation with other perspectives outside of Ishmael’s semi-omniscient narration. Once I’d become familiar and comfortable with the mode of storytelling, we started bouncing from Ahab’s point-of-view back to Ishmael over to Stubb, and the story suddenly revealed a passionate and intimate aspect that would become so important with Ahab’s consuming madness as the book reached its climax.

Everything in the story feels thoughtfully-constructed, but it occasionally falls into a predictable pattern that likely gives the book its reputation for—dare I say it—boringness. When the style changes feel fresh and organic (as in the perspective switches mentioned above), the mood and flow are well-affected. Frequently, however, Melville seems to be following the modern indie rock playbook: build up tension…build…Build…BUILD... release, ahh. Except here the tension comes from subjection to the minutest of details on whales, whalers, and whaling life that often come across as more creative and artistic Wikipedia entries. But then, right when you can’t take it anymore, and you drift into reverie contemplating the risk of eye injury from excessive computer-screen exposure, Melville switches into plot/action mode and the story takes off again…for 3 pages. (There are about 150 chapters in this book, which kinda makes you wonder about the institution date of the rule that literary and genre fiction must be distinguishable by chapter length).

So is Moby-Dick the Great American Novel? I don’t think so, but it may at least be The Quintessential American Novel, in the sense that it's imperfect and it chronicles single-minded, results-driven obsession as well as the destruction of living mystery and mastery of the awe-inspiring Unknown. I couldn’t help but bring my modern day whale knowledge and sensibilities to the text (a failure on my part), and yet as soon as the brutality and glorification of whale-killing reached its peak, Melville preempted and precluded my ready protestations. Indeed, he mocks all of us who eat meat and would object to the brutal whaling he describes:

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formerly indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.

And so I must begrudge Melville his whaling apology as I simultaneously confront my life’s own pusillanimous contradictions. In any case, Melville’s position shouldn’t be oversimplified—he’s interested in portraying both the glories and horrors of war and concedes that there are, in fact, ideals (however impossible/impractical they may be to attain): in legend, the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders.

Within a novel of such depth, where the literal nearly always represents something(s) more, such a close eco-reading is perhaps uncalled for. This book is overflowing with humor (French translation scene, anyone?), epic struggle, unhealthy human obsession (What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures), destiny, societal escapism, and good old-fashioned adventure. And never have I read a superior description of the sinusoidal curve of life; of our empty pursuits; of the fundamental patterns to which we subject ourselves (and are subjected):

Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! (i.e. soul-killing) Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from the world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when -- There she blows! -- the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.

Depressing and heartening. Life.

Best Taken in Small Doses

Many consider "Call me Ishmael" the greatest opening line in American literature. It is certainly one of the most famous and unconventional, violating all sorts of "rules" about writing. Ishmael himself is a minor character in the novel being merely the sailor telling the story.

When MOBY DICK was published in 1851, it received mixed reviews and was a commercial failure. It was not until the twentieth century that it came to be regarded as great literature and Melville to be regarded as one of the great American writers. It was praised by such authors as D.H. Lawrence, Carl Van Doren, William Faulkner, William Somerset Maugham and Ralph Ellison. If you don't care for the works of these and others who have praised Melville, that could be a clue as to how you will react to reading MOBY DICK.

I have a kind of love/hate relationship with MOBY DICK. I see great and wonderful passages in the book but find my interest and patience eventually wandering. I have to put it down, not for a few hours, but days, weeks at a time. Truthfully, I would rather watch the 1956 John Huston movie starring Gregory Peck and scripted by Ray Bradbury.

Did you know that the famous coffee chain, Starbucks, is named after the first mate in Moby Dick?

Apparently, the founder of Starbucks initially suggested The Pequod, but it didn’t really conjure up the image they were aiming for.

But the truth is this book could bore anyone stiff.

To be fair the first 1/3 and the last 20% are riveting. There are such memorable characters: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, and Starbucks. The slow reveal of Ahab, creating a God-like persona is expertly crafted. The moment of Queequeg and Ismael eating world-famous chowder is laugh-out-loud funny, and Queequeg’s heroism is unforgettable.

Then…..

Melville decides to abruptly shove every single fact about whales into the middle of the book, and it is B-O-R-I-N-G.

It is the classic case of an author conducting research who just doesn’t want to part with any source materials.

Melville should have fed the middle part of this book to Moby Dick.

In The Last Chairlift by John Irving, one of the characters dies while reading Moby Dick. And the main character is desperate to discover where the deceased character left off. She probably had trouble sleeping and decided to pick up Moby Dick. Perhaps it was so boring it killed her.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Electronic Text – $0.99 on Amazon
Audiobook – Free through Audible
Softcover text - $13.66 through Blackwell’s (Penguin Classic)

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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.

In 1819 in Manhattan, a strange trial was commencing. A merchant of that great city had been found in possession of barrels of spermacetti, the fine-quality oil which may be obtained from the head of the Sperm Whale. When an inspector demanded he pay the proper taxes on his goods, the merchant, who apparently made a hobby of science, declared that he had no fish product in his possession, and so the tax did not apply. He was duly arrested and, contending the charges, a trial was begun to determine, once-and-for-all, if whales were indeed, fish.

This was becoming an increasingly important question in the wake of Linneaus' great work and the recent codification by numerous biologists of the many families in which plants and animals numbered their descent, which would soon culminate in the great discovery of Darwin. Is it possible there was some familial connection between whales and dogs? Or more troublingly, between these alien monsters of the deep and humans? It was important to determine an answer, but it is singularly strange that the venue chosen to answer this question was not the halls of academia, or even the wild world of the working naturalist, but a courthouse, with judge, lawyers, and jury arguing the question.

Certainly, numerous scientists were brought in to testify, and so were experienced whale-hunters, who tended to give contradicting accounts. As D. Graham Burnett puts it, in his book on the trial, n  Trying Leviathann, these were men with 'lay expertise'--they dealt everyday with the subject at hand, but had no grasp of the history or theory behind it. One might point to the difference between the man who drives a car every day to work, and the man who knows how a car is built.

So it is somewhat strange that, thirty-two years later, Moby Dick seems to show us relatively little progress on this question. Melville first declares that whales are definitely fish (though he does not discount their mammalian structures), laments the many futile attempts to depict them accurately, and then embarks on an attempt to classify members of the species which is hardly scientific.

His approach was not a modern, thoroughly-researched analysis of the subject as it stood, but a conceptual exploration, and in the end, a flawed one, a failed experiment, and not the only one in Melville's great work.

There are mistaken details, dropped plotlines and characters, vast shifts in style and tone, changes in point-of-view, as if several different sorts of book were combined together. This is not a classic lauded for its narrow, precise perfection, but for its wide-reaching, seemingly-fearless leaps into waters both varied and deep.

Reading Melville's letters, it is clear he knew his experiment was not an entire success, but he pressed on boldly despite his doubts, refusing to write anything less grand just because he feared it might, in some parts, fail. It is a difficult thing for an author not to give in and write something smaller and safer, something certain. It is Achilles' choice: to live a small and easy life, which will be long and passing pleasant, or to strike at the skies, to die in the flame of youth, and become a song. Like Ahab, Melville attempts something grand, dangerous, and unknown.

'Like Ahab'.

It is a phrase we hear, which we understand, something pervasive. There are a number of reasons that Melville's great work, ignored and sneered at in his lifetime, is now preeminent. For all the flaws of his book, it is still full of remarkable successes.

It begins with several strange, ominous notes, like a Beethoven symphony, calling us to attention, with the mystic and dark theology of "There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within". But then it strikes away--there are still some dark shadows which flit across the scene, but for the most part, we are following Ishmael, in all of his funny, bumbling, pretentious, self-deprecating little adventures. It is, at the first, fundamentally a Sea Story in the old tradition, and we should not forget that it is a grand Romance, not serious-minded realism.

One thing I was not prepared for was this book's often subtle and sometimes uproarious humor. Sadly, that part seems to be missing from its great reputation. As a Romance, it is not precisely concerned with developing holistic character psychology, it is enough to have types and archetypes, though they are often twisted. The individual pieces on the board act less like individuals and more like different aspects of one mind, the central mind of the book itself, of which each character forms a small part.

So if relationships are sometimes rushed, or lapse, or are unfinished, those may be flaws in pacing, but each relationship is building together, contributing to the vision Melville gives us of his little world, so they are hardly pointless elements. It is more that Melville takes shortcuts here and there to tell the central story, for as he himself points out, to tell the whole story of Moby Dick is more than any one author could do.

Much has been made of the vast symbology of the book, probably too much. It is not an allegory, there is no one thing that the whale stands for, or Ahab, or the ship. They are all parts of a story, and while we may understand them by thinking about evil, or good, or fate, or faith, to try to boil them down to some simple meaning is to miss the point, and to turn a great story into nothing more than a fable. It is a mistake to go in asking 'what does this represent', it does the book a disservice. Asking this question is not necessary for us to understand the work.

Melville's bleak vision captured the imagination of the emerging post-modern thinkers who had seen the world wars tear apart concepts and assumptions which been long unchangeable and taken for granted. But it is not that this is a dark, hopeless book, but rather that it is a book which lacks simple, familiar answers. It does not wallow in the notion of hopelessness, but rather seems troubled by the fact that hope so often leads us to an inescapably hopeless place.

In the thirties and forties, this book became a sort of 'test' for intellectuals. It gives no easy answers, yet it displays a wide array of ideas, conclusions, conflicts, and worldviews. So when one literary critic asked another what he thought of Moby Dick, he was asking what he was able to create from this basic toolset of ideas which had no simple, right answer.

Unfortunately, this open-endedness has given the book an undeserved reputation of being inaccessible and requiring some vast store of knowledge in order to 'get' it. It is fundamentally a story about characters, and the only thing required to get it is to be a human being with an interest in other human beings. In fact, at one point, Melville makes a parody of the idea of the text which is full of allusions that only experts will understand, with the tale of 'Darmonodes and the elephant', which is not actually a real reference to anything, but was made up by Melville to tease those who are obsessed with dissecting every allusion.

Certainly, it does slow down around the middle, when we start getting various explanations about the history and methods of whaling, but the book is not a series of dry explanations, these are the collected stories and ideas of men. Though Melville, himself, only worked as a whaler for less than two years, he researched and compiled many different accounts to create his book. And these explorations of whaling, like the characters, all contribute to our understanding, they build meaning and help to color certain words and actions.

There are some terms which Melville likes to re-use throughout, and some of these seem to be stylistic oversights, but his repeated use of the term 'monomania' (monomaniacal, monomaniac) is a reference to a specific psychological condition, which is how Melville intends it to be taken, instead of as a simple description, so I don't count this as a 'favored word' of the author's but an example of specific use of a term.

Another of his experiments is to play around with the voice of the book, which starts as a first-person narrative by Ishmael, but also includes Shakespearean soliloquies and choral scenes (complete with stage directions) and a number of scenes which it seems impossible for Ishmael to have witnessed. As with most of the book, these are not obscure, nor do they make the action difficult to follow, they are just more example of Melville's playful experimentation.

Indeed, there is much of Shakespeare here, from the speeches of personal intent to the broad humor, the crew's sing-song banter, the melodramatic, grandiose characters, the occasional half-hidden sex joke, and the references to Biblical and Greek myth. But being a modern author, Melville's writing is easier to comprehend, particularly because much of his styling and pacing has passed into the modern form of books, movies, and television.

There are also some particularly beautiful passages where the prose begins to resemble poetry, and between the grotesque, funny characters and the thoughtful, careful writing in some scenes, I began to compare the work to The Gormenghast Novels, though while Peake maintains this style throughout, Melville often switches back and forth between styles and tones.

So, with all his mad switching about, his vast restlessness, Melville reveals that his own is more of a 'polymania'--an obsession with varying things--and while this does mean that his work has many errors, many experiments which didn't quite pan out, it also means that the book as a whole is completely full of remarkable, wonderful, funny, poignant, charming, exciting, thought-provoking, philosophical, historical, and scientific notions, so that even taking the flaws into account, there is just such a wealth of value in this book, so much to take away from it. And yet, don't worry about taking everything away--that's a fool's errand--Melville did his best to write what he could, trying not to worry about whether it was all perfect, so the least we can do is to be bold enough to read it as it is, and take what we can from it, without worrying whether we've gotten all of it.

Walk the beach, and do not worry about picking up every stone you see, but take a handful that please you and know that it was worth your while.

one time a guy i went on a date with told me that moby dick was his favorite book. this was a red flag, not because of the content of the book, but just the fact that this was his favorite meant that he was so mind-numbingly boring. which he was.

case in point.

—————————————
read this my sophomore year of high school because my English teacher told me this was the one classic she could not finish and i wanted to boost my ego just by proving that i could.

i did, and now i'll never get those hours back.

n  

"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost though seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.

nA month before this review was written, the video of what was described as "the first-ever footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat" was aired on television. This is the year 2013, 162 years after the publishing of Moby Dick, and we still do not have the fullest grasp of these monsters. Kraken. Leviathan. These creatures, capable of diving to depths that would crush our skulls in an instant, growing to such sizes that reduce anything land has ever conjured up to playthings. If any being was worthy of an entire book devoted to its existence, it would be found amongst these.

This is not merely a book, though. This is an obsession, an all-encompassing addiction. The reader will follow Ishmael following Ahab following the White Whale following Melville in his effort to pen down the Leviathan. Blood, bone, breadth, how it lives, how it dies, the physical prowess of its form, the seeming defiance of the laws of time and space, how it is classified and crucified and deified by man in an endless hunt through the ages. For Melville does deify it, this monstrous beast that inspired the tale of Jonah, a man who thought to escape divinity by fleeing to the sea. He sets Ahab as his Jonah, a man who has dared to slay multitudes of these gods of the sea, and sends out the White Whale. Ahab's body escapes, but his mind never emerges from the swallowing.

But it would be too simple to stop there, an allegory for a biblical text that holds meaning for only a fraction of the earth's population. The true power lies in its battle with the questions concerning the capability of thought.

n  Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides the higher truth, shoreless, indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!n

Thoughts are the neverending cascades of an ocean, and the mind is a sailor. True, the ocean is scattered with islands where one may rest in peace, sticking to simple lines of thought that adhere to the strictest principles for maintaining said peace. But for much of its breadth it is a roiling and dangerous frontier, and that is what keen minds crave. To go beyond the safety and chase down the great Leviathans of its waters, to strip these great carcasses down and drag their useful bits and pieces back to the calm and quiet mainland, to carve the bones into houses and burn the fat as fuel. To remain sated until the next urge springs it forth on the next great hunt. And each and every time there is the mortal danger of utter annihilation of ship and crew. Each and every time there are the insidious workings of a threat far worse than simple death, for the mind caught in an obsession that drives it to denounce everything else is a ship that is cursed.

n  "...as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastedly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul."n

It is the internal Flying Dutchman of a single soul to which nothing is sacred, least of all the obsessive addiction that drives it on. For in the end what drives the mind on is the thought of killing the obsession once and for all. The thought for survival be damned.

o _O

Mind blown....

My expectations were so low that I actually didn't mind Moby-Dick at all. The middle is the slowest part with the descriptions of ship life and whaling hurting my head quite a bit, but I enjoyed the characters and (most of the time) being inside Ishmael's mind. It's a densely-written novel so be prepared.

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.

So, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is supposed by many to be the greatest Engligh-language novel ever written, especially among those written in the Romantic tradition. Meh.

It's not that I don't get that there's a TON of complexity, subtlety, and depth to this book about a mad captain's quest for revenge against a great white whale. And on the surface it's even a pretty darn good adventure story. And, honestly, Melville's prose is flowing, elegant, and as beautiful as any writing can possibly be. It's magnificent, actually.

It's just that any enjoyment or satisfaction I got out of the book was overshadowed by the tedious, largely pointless stretches of encylopedic descriptions about the whaling industry. Melville strikes me as one of those people who would corner you at a party and talk incessantly about whaling, whaling ships, whales, whale diet, whale etymology, whale zoology, whale blubber, whale delacies, whale migration, whale oil, whale biology, whale ecology, whale meat, whale skinning, and every other possible topic about whales so that you'd finally have to pretend to have to go to the bathroom just to get away from the crazy old man. Only he'd FOLLOW YOU INTO THE BATHROOM and keep talking to you about whales while peering over the side of the stall and trying to make eye contact with you the whole time.

Look, it's not that I don't get it. Or at least some of it. I get, for example, that Ishmael's description of the absurdities of whale classification systems provide a backdrop against which to project the recurring theme of mankind's doomed quest for complete understanding of truths that are ineffable and forever hidden (sometimes literally) under the surface. I get that. I just wish the guy didn't feel like he had to take it to such absurd lengths. I do not need twenty pages about how to properly coil a harpoon line! I can see why most people don't make it through this book without judicious skimming.

Still, I feel like I accomplished something and that I can now nod sagely the next time someone makes an oblique reference to Captain Ahab, mentions the Pequod, or refers to something as "that person's Great White _______." And chances are they skimmed more than I did, anyway.

Few texts, I have found, are as joyous to read as Moby-Dick. I could count them on one hand. An almost intoxicating abundance of narrative pleasure. Did Melville not know that the whale is a mammal? So far it seems he does not, though he understands they’re vertebrates like us. Astonishing that I could have forgotten this since my third reading. This is my fourth.

Melville’s use of asides and soliloquy can only be described as Shakespearean. And the speeches of Ahab, too, in his stentorian throes, remind very much of the Bard. Then the ecstatic “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter seems so close in its dark frivolity to the night-town sequence in Ulysses. I wonder if Joyce knew it? Then there’s the idea of sperm whales as aggressive, which is not at all the case; they are placid animals. Not sure of their attitude though if you try to kill them. They just might take exception to your barbs.

Chapter 55 “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” is funny. The author critiques a number of errant depictions of whales, among them Perseus Descending by William Hogarth. Melville complains: “The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and it’s distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for Traitor’s Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower.” (p. 250)

Regarding Chapter 64 “Stubb’s Supper” there is something close to minstrelsy in the cook’s speech to the sharks, made at the insistence of Stubb, one of the mates. I could not help thinking it’s meant by Stubb to demean the black cook’s character. Melville gives the cook the freedom to speak his mind, and there’s no indication that he’s a slave, but rather a freeman who signed for the cruise like everyone else. Stubb puts him through his paces. It’s cruel; he’s ninety. We’re it not for the book’s general celebration of ethnic diversity—see Ishmael’s warm meeting with Queequeg, with whom he sleeps at the inn before sailing—were it not for this celebration of diversity throughout one might take offense here.

Whale killing is tragic, and an entirely worthy subject for one of our greatest writers.

“As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot holes of noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and little merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on his flank.

“‘A nice spot,’ cried Flask; ‘just let me prick him there once.’

“‘Avast!’ cried Starbuck, ‘there’s no need of that!’

“But humane Starbuck was too late. At that instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than insufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darting at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurgling‘s the spray column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.” (p. 331)

Published in 1851, it is not the most up-to-date reference work on whales. The narrator seems not to have believed that the sperm whale could in its numbers ever be driven to the edge of extinction. Moreover, the book was published before On the Origin of Species. Melville acknowledges the whale’s anatomical similarities with man, but he never sees that the whale like mankind is a mammalian. Several other mistakes of this magnitude also. But we don’t read Moby Dick for the science, do we? You read it for the prose. And that is an unalloyed joy!

Last note, I would be grateful to anyone who could explain to me Melville’s use of the semicolon in Moby Dick. There’s no rhyme or reason that I can see.