Moby-Dick: or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
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| published
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September 1st 2001
by Penguin (Non-Classics)
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| first published
| 1851 |
| binding
| Paperback |
| isbn
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0142000086
(isbn13: 9780142000083)
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| ebook |
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| pages
| 672 |
| date added
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12-08-06
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I have often said that if trapped on a desert island, I’d want Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki as the one book with me (rim shot). Being serious, I’ve later decided that since Catch-22 suits my mood any time I pick it up, that would be my real choice. Yet every time I read Herman Melville’s towering Moby Dick, I firmly believe that no other book should suffice.
It’s one of those books you always mean to read. “Oh yes, I’ve got Moby Dick on my list and Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses a...more
I have often said that if trapped on a desert island, I’d want Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki as the one book with me (rim shot). Being serious, I’ve later decided that since Catch-22 suits my mood any time I pick it up, that would be my real choice. Yet every time I read Herman Melville’s towering Moby Dick, I firmly believe that no other book should suffice.
It’s one of those books you always mean to read. “Oh yes, I’ve got Moby Dick on my list and Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past,” you tell yourself, getting around to reading them always a project you keep putting off. I put off reading Moby Dick until a good friend praised it to the heavens. His enthusiasm sparked me to pick up this old classic and give it a whirl. It was one of the most thrilling books I’d ever read before — and I never would have guessed it previously.
I loved Moby Dick so much that for the first year of my daughter’s life every day I read her a little of the novel until I’d read the whole thing through a second time. It always put her to sleep, but you never know. She certainly loves books at any rate.
The effect of reading Moby Dick is akin to devouring an obscure, somewhat bizarre, absolutely beautiful religious work. It is often described as the epitome of the romantics and the transcendentalists, and the reputation is well earned. Nearly everyone knows the first line of the novel, “Call me Ishmael,” and he alerts us rather quickly to the novel’s overarching symbolic nature.
Prior to even leaving the shore as Ishmael tramps about New Bedford, Massachusetts, he notes the inauspicious symbology of Peter Coffin’s establishment yet fails to note at The Trap earlier up the road, a black church, the homily is of the blackness of darkness. Later in the church of Father Mapple, Melville will have the priest deliver us the sermon from the book of Jonah no less, padding out the story with anecdotal filigree. Ominous opening elements, indeed.
Such charged portents fill out the book, and indeed Melville is masterful in making something as simple as wind in a sail alive with meaning on several levels. His prose is at times as simplistic as an old sea dog might wish, yet there slyly eases up through the passages a dark and forbidding poetry.
Further, it can hardly seem propitious, sailors being such superstitious types, that when Ishmael has his interview with the partial owners of the Pequod they are a curious batch of scattered and crack-brained types. Captain Ahab Ishmael doesn’t even get to meet as he hides in his cabin and is described as “a queer man.” The businessmen he does speak with, co-owners with Ahab, Captains Peleg and Bildad are an amusing pairing of opposites, the one a devout Quaker and student of the Bible, the other a pragmatic old tar.
Which are the two dominating impulses among Ishmael, Ahab, and sailors in general. The book vacillates betwixt symbolic religiosity and almost supernatural meaning and agents, and the day-to-day business of running a whaling vessel. Melville, believing no true and honest account of life on a whaling ship had yet been written (or at least published) dedicates great long passages to how blubber is cut and boiled down into oil, how spermacetti is harvested, the appropriate difficulties in obtaining ambergris, and how a ship is put to spic-and-span rights after the bloody business of taking a whale.
The peculiarities of whaling life and culture are fascinating, and Melville takes pains to deliver them in encyclopedic detail. A most interesting one is the pulpit of Father Mapple:
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea....and upon climbing it: Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.
Melville then regularly educates the reader in the aspects of whaling and whales in general, and he does so periodically throughout the course of the novel, never piling on too much at once, but spreading it thinner here, thicker there. The effect is a heady book, both entertaining in the best sense of the word, and also learned. The high pulse thrills of the men in their little boats as they try to beach themselves against the whales so as to best plunge in the harpoons gives way to the quieter disquisition on the various types and categories of whales.
What else is nicely done? It’s hard just to pick one element of the novel. How about how long is put off the appearance of Ahab, wrapping clouds of mystery and menace around the man, his madness alluded to, his idee fixee never fully present but ghosting through the narrative. Upon his first striding of the stage, it is a silent peg-legged strutting of the deck, his aspect fearsome, his white whale bone prosthetic ominous. After having once made his appearance, Ahab disappears shortly. Afterwards, he is described as being more upon the deck than in his cabin.
Consider too if you will this perfect example, now that Ahab has made his appearance, of how Melville takes a simple thing and charges it with powerful symbolism:
And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.
For entertainment purposes there’s little you can complain of in the monologues engaged in by Second Mate Stubb in his boat as he urges on his rowers:
Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know; — merry’s the word. Pull, babes — pull, sucklings — pull, all. But what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two — that’s all. Take it easy — why don’t ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your livers and lungs!”
He also goes to great lengths to demonstrate the deep and loving union that develops between Ishmael and the harpooneer Queequeg. Chapters ten and eleven are some of the more beautiful pieces of writing for the years in which Melville was living, the development of Ishmael’s friendship with Queequeg a thing to behold. Certainly there is still the reversion to referring to he and his countrymen as savages and ignorant, but in things like the two of them abed talking through the night and the acceptance of smoking in bed by Ishmael, you get the deepest sense of recognition. So much apart at the beginning, the two are bound by bonds of love by this point.
Of course, one must consider all such racial nonsense in the context of the times even if there were plenty of enlightened abolitionists and egalitarians about. While just as much a stereotype as the “ignorant subhuman,” Melville at least is more of the “noble savage” mind in his regard for the harpooners whose racial characteristics he is never at a loss to mention. To be fair, he also includes among his savages the Greek warrior Achilles and the Dutch painter Albrecht Durer, but if one were to choose between being portrayed as “ignorant subhuman” or “noble savage,” I know which I’d quicker choose.
There are moments, however, when it occurred to me that perhaps Melville’s book, as erudite as it is on ship construction, whale anatomy, and other such obscure items, might not translate perfectly to an audiobook. “[I]t behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels” might be a poetic phrasing and the sentiment of an intellectual, but audio-wise it bogs things down a bit. And I say this, again, as a person who has actually read the entirety of the book out loud.
While listening over four days, it was on day three that the narration sagged most, as it were kind of an ocean voyage in microcosm. First novelty and excitement, then learning, then the slow drudge of work and non-events filling the time, and on day four the book was again a lively and potent-filled drama, thrilling and bleak. Here Melville ekes out beautifully stark images such as the hawk who snatches Ahab’s hat while he’s up in the mast-head then “flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.”
I have tried to explain this to those who’ve never read Moby Dick, how the scenes of actual hunting of whales, most specifically the three days chasing the white whale that make up the climax of the novel, are thrilling, more action packed and pulse-quickening than a stack of Grishams or whatever pocket paperback writer you may imagine. Most people simply look at me like I’m nuts, but it is still the truth. Moby Dick, a hundred and fifty six years after its publication, may still be the best American novel, bar none.
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Read in July, 2008
Avast! Here be spoilers!
I loved this book. But I don’t really want to talk about my feelings; I want to talk about how Melville wrote a truly radical book, a book that turns the world upside-down, one of the Best. Books. Ever.
Moby Dick begins as the story of a fastidious Yankee schoolmaster who signs onto a whaling voyage but finds himself in the realm of topsy-turvy. At first he is terrified and disgusted by his boarding house's filth and by his bedmate, Queequeg, a South Paci...more
Avast! Here be spoilers!
I loved this book. But I don’t really want to talk about my feelings; I want to talk about how Melville wrote a truly radical book, a book that turns the world upside-down, one of the Best. Books. Ever.
Moby Dick begins as the story of a fastidious Yankee schoolmaster who signs onto a whaling voyage but finds himself in the realm of topsy-turvy. At first he is terrified and disgusted by his boarding house's filth and by his bedmate, Queequeg, a South Pacific cannibal, idolater, and tattooed guy. But Queequeg's affection, integrity, and bravery destroy many of our whaler’s prejudices about race, nation, religion, and relationships between men: "Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair." He even consents to worship Queequeg's little carved idol Yojo: after all, if his own Presbyterianism demands that he do unto others blah blah blah, and if he would have Queequeg join his own faith, "Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator." So far this is all charming, funny, and slyly subversive. But Melville's project seeks to upset even more fundamental prejudices about humans, nature, and God: that these categories exist in hierarchy, that they are not interchangeable, and that they possess any discrete characteristics at all.
Our narrator tells us that whales are more or less fish, and that they are often deadly to their human hunters. This combination of baseness, bestiality, violence, and superiority in the whale unsettles the assumption of human ascendancy in the food chain, evolution, and/or God’s Creation. This is unsettling stuff; in a typically 19thC (and 20th) way, there follow dozens of approaches to understanding –and delimiting--the whale: biological, historical, fabular, anecdotal, commercial, religious, etymological, archaeological, all intended to quell uncertainty and establish a chain of command: man on top, fish bottom (even rejecting the possibility that such a brute of an animal could be a mammal). But Captain Ahab’s mission—to exact revenge on the whale who bit off his leg—upsets all of these rational claims.
“’Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’” A man who regards a fish as his antagonist also acknowledges a kind of equality with that fish: either the man becomes less a man, or acknowledges the fish as more than animal. Ahab does indeed blaspheme; in claiming Moby Dick as his enemy, his tormentor, his ambition, and his end, he rejects both the divine mandate in Genesis for men to dominate animals, and the supposed resemblance between God and man. His obsession puts his ship and sailors in the deepest danger: not of being killed, but of ceding their special relationship with God, i.e., their in/difference to animals, their humanity. And the sailors give it up, willingly, in stupendous cult scenes sealed with blood! If a man can give up the attributes that heretofore defined him as a man, choosing to seek equality with the non-white, the non-Christian….then why not seek equality with a fish? If this is madness, it is the madness of the utter destabilization of authority and identity: Ahab, devilry, Moby Dick, animality, humanity, and godlike aspirations—all are mixed.
In some of the strangest and most wonderful passages, Melville uses form to demonstrate the disintegration of the crew’s humanity: the intense characterization vanishes, to be replaced by theatrical choruses, incursions from one point of view into another, the occasional struggling return to a kind of documentary objectiveness, which gives way to further dissolution of reason (see our narrator’s impassioned rant on what Moby Dick means, personally, to him: whiteness itself, the very element of divinity and horror, according to him). As a character, our narrator virtually disappears: his confident first-person gives way, even his name ceases to be mentioned. Other characters persist, but increasingly do so only in worshipful apprehension of the whale—some numbly, some eagerly, but all of them looking forward to the whale’s coming as the denouement of their endeavor. Form unravels; human aspiration to godliness unravels; and our narrator, who has accepted a great many paradoxes and uncertainties, must finally suffer the consequences of his acceptance.
If Ahab is a portrait of a madman struggling between his bestiality and his sublimity, then what of the whale? The reader who has been tracking these disruptions will be waiting for Melville to recognize the whale’s rights as an individual being, to explore the moral implications of his uncanny anatomical , behavioral, and emotional likeness to men, and to feel compassion for his plight (our narrator’s increasing use of the epithet “poor whale” is telling); that is, we expect to see the whale humanized. But in the last pages of the novel, Melville accomplishes a wondrous feat: we see the whale not as humanlike, and certainly not as a mere symbol of any of these embattled traits, but as a whale qua whale, which is an animal, which is divine.
“A gentle joyousness - a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.” And, “warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.”
The most confounding moment of all, when everything we understand of this world comes to its fulfillment, is when we see that Moby Dick is beautiful, that he is a happy whale who delights in his whalishness, that he has sea-fowl groupies who love him. He is the most powerful, lovely, destructive, peaceful, astonishing thing in the world. He has an existence of his own, self-sufficient, without regard for human intention, and inscrutable to human regard. He is a mystery who refuses to be understood by science or history. These are the attributes of God, and Moby Dick is a fish. To aspire to godliness is to aspire to fishiness. The human-God equation has been shattered.
In this world, what room is there for humans? Well. Ahab gets real mad at all this; he and Moby Dick tussle it out to the end. The Pequod sinks, taking down all the sailors; Tashtego, who’s climbed to the top of the mainmast, is last seen as an arm reaching over the waves: “at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”
Only one man witnesses this last snub at heaven; one man survives utter dissolution, and he asks us to call him Ishmael.
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Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
Whale Lovers/Whale Haters
I really didn't know what to expect from this book other than what comes down the pike (i.e. crazy man with one leg captains a whaling ship and wants to seek revenge on the whale that bit his leg off). For one, I'll just say that this book is much more a celebration of whales--or, more specifically, the sperm whale--than it is a book about killing whales. I mean, don't get me wrong: If the whole idea of catching and slicing up whales make you squeamish, you will probably be horrified by more tha...more
I really didn't know what to expect from this book other than what comes down the pike (i.e. crazy man with one leg captains a whaling ship and wants to seek revenge on the whale that bit his leg off). For one, I'll just say that this book is much more a celebration of whales--or, more specifically, the sperm whale--than it is a book about killing whales. I mean, don't get me wrong: If the whole idea of catching and slicing up whales make you squeamish, you will probably be horrified by more than a few passages in the book, not to mention the fact that the sole purpose of the voyage being undertaken in the book is to do exactly that (kill whales). But if you put yourself back in the time when the book was written and try to not judge too harshly by today's killing-whales-is-really-really-bad (which I agree with) standards, then, yeah, you'll see Melville really set out to put whaling and, by extension, the sperm whale, on the map. Pages and pages are dedicated to an exhaustible understanding of the whale itself.
The other thing I wasn't expecting in this book was the overwrought prose. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me, considering when the book was written, but, to some extent, it did. Not that it was always a bad thing. When I had time to really sit down with this book, I rather enjoyed a lot of the more poetic passages. Here's an example of Ishmael describing Moby Dick (the whale) for the first time:
On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all for who the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
This paragraph perfectly captures the peacefullness and destructive force that Moby Dick, and the sea itself at large, represent. Hemingway wrote a story about an old man and a fish, but he could (nor would) never do justice to all the poetic majesty of the sea and seafaring life.
However, what Hemingway could do was sublimely represent the masculine and stoic grace of the sort of characters who did lead seafaring lives. And I guess that's where the contrast lies (and where I'm also sort of torn about who writes a better seafaring story in the Melville-vs.-Hemingway title fight I just made up): more than once I thought about how, due to the prose, Ishmael comes off sounding more like a prancing, lisping, effete, Little Lord Fauntleroy describing (and ascribing) the most fanciful things to what were probably very stoic and burly men in the most flowery prose. On the one hand, if you can get over that, then, yes, the prose often is quite beautiful and, again, much much better at touching the rightful majesty of the sea. But, yeah, on the other hand, reading Moby Dick, you get the feeling that most of the sailors on any given ship-of-fools at that time probably didn't talk in the way Melville ascribes to them (unless it was an especially well-read ship-of-fools) and, at the very least, that the old, grumpy Ahab didn't speak in parables more fitting to Homer than a whaling ship.
But Melville probably has more in common with Homer than Hemingway as far as what each was trying to accomplish with their respective stories. Both Melville and Homer want to inject a large amount of poetry and eminence into what are essentially professions that require neither poetry nor eminence (whaling and warring, respectively). Hemingway uses understatement to, as I said earlier, do justice to the terse, stoic nature of the men who populate his books.
Also, Melville is funny. Seriously. But not seriously funny. Just funny.
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Read in June, 2008
When someone speaks of “The Great American Novel” as a literary ideal, they’re likely thinking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, A Catcher in the Rye or Moby Dick. In fact, I’d wager that if you were to ask any random stranger on the street to name the first book off the top of their head, Moby Dick would come up as often if not more than the Bible.
So what more can really be said about this novel that is practically a synonym for “book.” What can you re...more
When someone speaks of “The Great American Novel” as a literary ideal, they’re likely thinking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, A Catcher in the Rye or Moby Dick. In fact, I’d wager that if you were to ask any random stranger on the street to name the first book off the top of their head, Moby Dick would come up as often if not more than the Bible.
So what more can really be said about this novel that is practically a synonym for “book.” What can you really contribute to a conversation about a story that’s been celebrated for more than a century and a half?
That in mind, instead of explaining why I enjoyed the novel, I’ll hep you to how I enjoyed it.
Recently I’ve had about 3-5 books cracked at any given time (this is unusual, I’m not really all that bookish). There's one for my bus commute, one on my night stand, and one or two less narrative books lying about the house to pick up when the previous two aren’t within grasp. I’ve even been carrying around a PDF of an e-book I started on thumb drive “just in case.”
Yet, between all those and the huge volume of TV and internet I consume, I’ve found yet another way to wedge just a little more in. Maybe about two years ago, thanks to a story on NPR, I discovered librivox.org.
Librivox is a volunteer-run site featuring hundreds of recordings of public domain works. You can just go to the site, look up a book or author, then either download a podcast or stream it from a browser.
Now, when you listen like I have – wearing headphones while at work – it can be a pretty passive experience, and not the engaging act of consuming the words off the page yourself. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who wants a real in-depth understanding of a work. I mean, unless I’m mistaken, the climactic scene in Moby Dick goes something like:
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale;
to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I” … have a design meeting in fifteen minutes. Decline? Accept? Ignore?
But if you’re just looking for a cursory exposure to the material, a fun alternative to music on your iPod for jogging or what have you, or a quick way to refamiliarize yourself with a classic, this is a great way to do it. Readings even have a certain advantage to them. The readers aren’t actors, and the recordings can be hit or miss, but when you have someone like the guy who read for Moby Dick, who clearly has a passion for accents and characters, it helps keep the individual characters separated when they might otherwise get lost in the unchanging monotone of other readers.
I dunno, some people might find that annoying, but I thought the reader’s attempt to capture the accent of mid-eighteenth century New England Quakers was charming.
Mark Twain once said “A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.” Too true. Despite my curiosity, I probably wouldn’t actually pick up a copy of Moby Dick or Frankenstein or Anna Karenina, but thanks to Librivox, Twain is still correct – we don’t have to read them, we can osmotically absorb them!
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Read in April, 2008
recommended to Colie! by:
Cara and Elizabeth
recommends it for:
Anyone American. Know your lit!
The best part of reading Moby Dick is looking for unintentional innuendo. The title begs for it. So far, I believe this is my favorite chestnut: “At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.”
I've had similar experiences myself.
Right on. Now that I've finished the book, I ...more
The best part of reading Moby Dick is looking for unintentional innuendo. The title begs for it. So far, I believe this is my favorite chestnut: “At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.”
I've had similar experiences myself.
Right on. Now that I've finished the book, I can speak further than my sophomoric joy of homoerotic quote hunting, for which this book has fertile grounds. It took me a while to finish, but I blame Los Angeles. I don't have the luxury of subway rides to peruse. And it's all sunny, all you want to do is be outside and do yoga. Anyway. I started and stopped MD a few times in my youth (you know, like age 13 youth) and when I picked it up again, I couldn't believe how FAST it read. Then of course it got slow in the middle... Ishmael likes to ruminate over measurements of whale bones, physical traits of Sperm v. Right Whale, Whales in art and history, which I guess is all well and good, but once that's done with and we return to the story of Stubb and Starbuck and Tashtego, Queequeg, and OF COURSE that crazy hot old man Ahab, it's a reading feeding frenzy. I'd have to say those pages read about 20 times faster, minimum. Which made me super sad that they were, in my opinion, so scare. (Scarce in a 1,000 pager.) And I was in complete disbelief when I actually completed my read: these pages zip by, and in 1.5 pages you're DONE. It's so fast, you don't even trust yourself to believe what you read really happened. I had to skip back and reread. [Avast, here be spoilers:] I thought, "No way I read that right. Is Ahab gone? The whole Pequod? WTF!!!" And then there's this half page epilogue to confirm: yep, that's all, folks. Part of me was really pissed: Ishmael, you couldn't give it JUST a little more time? It kind of felt like a poorly planned essay for the SAT, where the middle is fleshed out really completely but then the student finds he only has one minute to wrap it up. But I think Melville probably wasn't writing under that kind of time constraint. On the other hand, my feelings of loss and abandonment seemed somehow appropriate for the book, like I was left in the big open sea, sans Pequod, on a floating coffin myself. ...less
Read in June, 2008
recommends it for:
everyone
Incredible. Incomparable. Ineffable.
One of the most challenging and most intense novels to which I have ever put my mind. Over the course of reading this book, I encountered resistance. When I said I was reading it, someone responded, "On purpose?" Just today, finishing it in a cafe, a couple sitting across from me spoke of the book to each other. "Have you read Moby Dick?" asked the girl. "I tried but it didn't do it for me," said the guy. Who are these people....more
Incredible. Incomparable. Ineffable.
One of the most challenging and most intense novels to which I have ever put my mind. Over the course of reading this book, I encountered resistance. When I said I was reading it, someone responded, "On purpose?" Just today, finishing it in a cafe, a couple sitting across from me spoke of the book to each other. "Have you read Moby Dick?" asked the girl. "I tried but it didn't do it for me," said the guy. Who are these people.
Maybe I'm a literary snob. I don't think that's such a bad thing. If you don't become ill at the state of modern "popular" fiction, sometimes called literature but resoundingly far from it, you have not given enough time to exploring how things once were; how dedicated writers were to creating an experience; a time when craft reigned. After reading Moby Dick, I'm just dumbstruck as to what passes for literature these days.
But then maybe people don't want to be challenged anymore. Maybe books have become as much a diversion as television. Sure, books are meant to be a diversion; they are meant to be enjoyable and to pass the time in a pleasant way. Otherwise, why read? But Moby Dick is more than that and literature should be more than that. Books should change you and open you up and free you. Modern fiction is little more than reality tv. Why else would the modern reader be so obsessed with both the non-fiction and fiction memoir? We want to escape but not be challenged. We pick up a book like Moby Dick, feel pressured by it to think, and put it right back down.
Moby Dick is the American epic. There is nothing even close to it. If you think you know of a book that can rival it, let me read it and prove you wrong. This is the novel that all other novels should strive to be in spirit. How can these people turn it away?
Go back to your Palahniuks and Lethams and Eggers and everything else masquerading as something important. Don't give Moby Dick a chance, don't open your eyes, and relax deep into your easy-chair of mediocrity. Moby Dick is difficult. Moby Dick is something you won't fully understand when you try to read it in high school, in college, in your formative years, in your later years. It is something that needs multiple readings and needs to be read at a time in your life when you are most susceptible to the truths it entails. It deserves to be read now and forever.
We all have a White Whale we are chasing. The question is whether or not one may ever truly recognize it....less
Read in January, 2006
This book currently occupies a hallowed place on my favorite-books-shelf. I've read all of it once, and parts of it thrice. My first copy (which is now one of two in my possession) was increasingly dog-eared the further along I read. The sheer beauty of some of Melville's passages can stop my breath momentarily; while at other times, his comedy makes me laugh out loud -- any book that can make me do either of these is notable, and a book that does both is exceptional.
Ishmael, the narrator...more
This book currently occupies a hallowed place on my favorite-books-shelf. I've read all of it once, and parts of it thrice. My first copy (which is now one of two in my possession) was increasingly dog-eared the further along I read. The sheer beauty of some of Melville's passages can stop my breath momentarily; while at other times, his comedy makes me laugh out loud -- any book that can make me do either of these is notable, and a book that does both is exceptional.
Ishmael, the narrator, is a school teacher who takes to the sea "whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off..." I find I have to quote this passage (from the first page) directly, because it is not only brilliantly written but a perfect example of Melville's blend of humor, pathos, and perspective. Plus, it makes me want to reread the entire book every time I see it.
The book is, in my opinion, not primarily a parable of obsession, vengeance, and the limits of humanity thrown into relief by the isolation of the sea -- blah, blah, blah. Its readers are often bored by its encyclopedic passages detailing the intricacies of whaling ships or cetology or the "try-works". However, these passages are very much in the character of our narrator: Ishmael is a school teacher who passionately loves learning and revels in describing as much as possible of the life constituted by "whaling". Perhaps it is because I can share in this love of learning that these passages have never bored me in that way.
Moreover, I think the book is often absolutely hysterical: "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." Or "Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed." And those are just in the first 10 (short!) chapters.
All in all, the book could be divided up, as some have said before, into the story of Ahab, the story of Ishamel, a treatise on whaling, and a tome of short stories of the sea, and any one of them alone would be exceptional. However, their combination yields a work of complex beauty that holds me in awe and harbors a power and singularity I have found in very few other places....less
Read in August, 2007
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 b...more
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....less
bookshelves:
classics
Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
Masochists
Moby Dick is probably two or three books that, if separated, could be good - Ahab's whaling story, a book on the anatomy of whales, and the narrator's tale of largely religious self exploration - and it's easy to see how someone could love it.
But I don't - frankly, I find the mix frustrating. With Ahab's story, which was the most interesting part to me, every time it gets a bit of momentum the narrator interrupts with a chapter along the lines of 'More About The Whale's Eye' that completely...more
Moby Dick is probably two or three books that, if separated, could be good - Ahab's whaling story, a book on the anatomy of whales, and the narrator's tale of largely religious self exploration - and it's easy to see how someone could love it.
But I don't - frankly, I find the mix frustrating. With Ahab's story, which was the most interesting part to me, every time it gets a bit of momentum the narrator interrupts with a chapter along the lines of 'More About The Whale's Eye' that completely kills it, often with an excessively heavy-handed dose of religious perspective. It never quite seems to settle into being story, or philosophy, so much as swinging back and forth between them so that when I've settled into reading one, the other jumps out and throws me for a loop.
Also, while the language is occasionally so beautiful that it's nearly unforgettable, it's also occasionally awful, with dreadful structure that reads badly. It's not just age - I've read older books that read much better than this. Sometimes, I got the impression that Melville just stuck his hand into a big bag of punctuation and threw it at the page, hoping for the best.
In the end, the story underneath is a great one, which probably justifies why the book is such a classic. Ahab's character is intriguing and powerful, the view of the whale is genuinely interesting at times, and even the narrator's self exploration could be intriguing - but as a whole, I find the three work against each other, not together. They don't complement, but instead read as though the writer starts telling you one thing, gets bored with it and suddenly goes off on a tangent for a while - the sort of thing you'd expect from an amateur writer with ADD, not a legendary work of fiction.
So, even though I find many things to recommend it, I can't recommend the book - I found it just too painful an experience to read it. Ultimately, I join many of Melville's contemporary critics in disliking it.
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bookshelves:
adoration-of-author,
favorites,
whosecanonisitanyway
Read in January, 2008
When I first attempted to read this book, I was in a first-year Creative Writing Class. At the time, I was less than enthused about reading yet another white male, after a long run of school assigned reading of only white men. So I was resistant. And perhaps rightly so. After years of not having the opportunity to read international literature and literature by people of color, to my heart's content, I needed a break. An opportunity to explore and revel.
And then I re-read Invisible Man by Ra...more
When I first attempted to read this book, I was in a first-year Creative Writing Class. At the time, I was less than enthused about reading yet another white male, after a long run of school assigned reading of only white men. So I was resistant. And perhaps rightly so. After years of not having the opportunity to read international literature and literature by people of color, to my heart's content, I needed a break. An opportunity to explore and revel.
And then I re-read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, which I found to be one of the best American novels written. Ellison, in his letters, often mentions the impact that Herman Melville had on him, and references Moby Dick as a discussion of nationhood, race, and obsession.
Well, I'd never heard the book positioned in this way. It more than piqued my interest. It drew me in to explore. I'd always loved Melville's short stories, so I dove in. How happy I am that I went back.
Now when I hear that Moby Dick is the best American novel, I nod in agreement - relish the imagery of Ahab upon his perch on the deck, think of Melville's well-placed humor, wonder at the role of destiny (manifest and otherwise), think of the pacing of the novel - the feat of building up to the crescendo, and the desperate search for belonging.
Well worth the wait and meets all the hype and adoration. If only it was introduced as a book, not only beautifully written, but one which seeks to investigate class and race dynamics in a new America. If it were explained that,Moby Dick is not only a symbol for obsession, but also a symbol of desire and yearning for whiteness, it would perhaps be far more interesting to read and enjoy....less
Ah, Moby Dick. Is it the Great American Novel? Probably. Only Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby comes close to stealing the title. But Melville’s work has so much more symbolic depth and monolithic weight going for it.
I love this book -- back when I lived in California, I would go to Venice beach each autumn for a two-day, dawn-to-dusk reading of the book, organized by a man who hoped to build a Venice oceanarium. People would go down to the sand, to sit on blankets and eat food donated by l...more
Ah, Moby Dick. Is it the Great American Novel? Probably. Only Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby comes close to stealing the title. But Melville’s work has so much more symbolic depth and monolithic weight going for it.
I love this book -- back when I lived in California, I would go to Venice beach each autumn for a two-day, dawn-to-dusk reading of the book, organized by a man who hoped to build a Venice oceanarium. People would go down to the sand, to sit on blankets and eat food donated by local shops, and take turns reading from the book at a little microphone. Anyone can read if he or she wants, reciting aloud the tale of Ahab and the whale and their mutual obsession. By the end of each day, folks are lying around, wrapped in warm sweatshirts, as the sun sinks out past Catalina, “and the great shroud of the sea roll[s] on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
GREAT QUOTE:
"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has existed from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practicably assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it."
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Read in May, 2008
recommends it for:
monomaniacs
Whew. Reading Moby Dick was like getting stuck at a party talking with THAT guy. You know who I mean. THAT guy who talks nonstop about his job the whole time, never perceiving your quickly waning interest. Yeah dude, I get it, whaling is the greatest profession of all time (reach for the pistol). Right, whalemen are the most amazing representatives of mankind, I get it (insert into mouth). Yes, whales are spectacular creatures with no comparison to any other creature who has ever or will ev...more
Whew. Reading Moby Dick was like getting stuck at a party talking with THAT guy. You know who I mean. THAT guy who talks nonstop about his job the whole time, never perceiving your quickly waning interest. Yeah dude, I get it, whaling is the greatest profession of all time (reach for the pistol). Right, whalemen are the most amazing representatives of mankind, I get it (insert into mouth). Yes, whales are spectacular creatures with no comparison to any other creature who has ever or will ever inhabit the earth. I get it (pull the trigger and end misery). Ok, maybe I'm being a little harsh, but this book is definitely a little DRY. How many times can we describe Ahab as a "monomaniac"? Was there some kind of contest between Melville and a contemporary where whoever used "monomaniac" the most in a novel won some kind of prize? Was it the word of the day a la Pee Wee Herman, and we're all supposed to go wild when we read it? Thesaurus ... Melville. Melville ... Thesaurus. I'll leave you two alone for a bit to get acquainted. I mean, I've read people comparing Melville to Shakespeare. Please, this ain't no Hamlet.
I will say, by the time I actually made it to the part of the book where Moby Dick makes his presence known I felt as though I had been through a many years long voyage to get there. So, in a way I was experiencing the emotions of Ahab in what felt like first hand. And I understand Ahabs views were very groundbreaking for the 19th century, which is interesting as a study of American literature, but unfortunately not as a bedtime read. Who knows, maybe at a less jaded age (12ish maybe), I would have been more in awe of the detailed accounts of a monomaniac whaling expedition. Just didn't do it for me this time around. Monomaniac, monomaniac, monomaniac! (I think Melville still has me beat)...less
I actually thoroughly enjoyed Moby Dick. Although it was very long, I enjoyed all of the stories inside the novel. I especially liked the prophecy and his foreshadowing doom for the Pequod. Ishmael was an interesting character and an awesome narrator. Melville has an astounding writing style and used it phenomenally in the novel. His words flowed very nicely together making it easy to read. I liked the assortment of characters on the ship, because they kept it interesting. The fact that they le...more
I actually thoroughly enjoyed Moby Dick. Although it was very long, I enjoyed all of the stories inside the novel. I especially liked the prophecy and his foreshadowing doom for the Pequod. Ishmael was an interesting character and an awesome narrator. Melville has an astounding writing style and used it phenomenally in the novel. His words flowed very nicely together making it easy to read. I liked the assortment of characters on the ship, because they kept it interesting. The fact that they left of christmas day can explain them all. Overall I really enjoyed the novel.
The importance of theme in the novel is huge, although it is not always pointed out directly. Melville explains the importance of the fates through experiences such as the prophet. Gabriel, the prophet, although seems a little insane predicted Pequod's doom. It weighed very heavily in the story because all of the characters on the ship tended to feed into the fates and put full confidence in prophecies. They all come from different backgrounds and don't have much to believe in, so they put their faith in fate. The theme of life and death is evident throughout the novel as well. Queequeg's coffin for example symbolizes death before he even dies and when he becomes healthy again it remains to symbolize death. The prophet predicts doom which implies death. The characters will risk their life to put their doubts about Moby Dick away by catching him. They will die in order to feel the comfort of knowing the unknown. When the Pequod goes down and all of the characters die it is almost ironic that Ishmael is the only one left alive. It was his idea to find Moby Dick and risk it all and he is the only one that survives. Death stares the characters in the face a few times and is important in tying the story together....less
bookshelves:
gutenberg-downloads
Read in March, 2008
recommends it for:
Folks who don't mind hundreds of pages categorising whales via a unique system based on book sizes
Long one, from right after I first read it:
Um? By the time I got into higher school, I wasn't like, literary (I was obsessed with Dune, and Richard Brautigan, okay?), and in college the extent of how much I cared for non SF canon and sub-canon pretty much began and ended with personal interpretations of Shakespeare and believing that Sonnet 18 was a eulogy. In other words, less than nought. So, other than the basic ideas needed to remain culturally literate and a fondness for the name &...more
Long one, from right after I first read it:
Um? By the time I got into higher school, I wasn't like, literary (I was obsessed with Dune, and Richard Brautigan, okay?), and in college the extent of how much I cared for non SF canon and sub-canon pretty much began and ended with personal interpretations of Shakespeare and believing that Sonnet 18 was a eulogy. In other words, less than nought. So, other than the basic ideas needed to remain culturally literate and a fondness for the name "Ishmael", Moby Dick passed me by. It's a long book, and I'm not like, an analyser, so this'll be quick.
Basically, I guess it's supposed to be a descent into madness/inescapable obsession? But for me, the whole feeling of this book was endearing whimsy and fey humour (with a morbid sense of life, but that's what makes it great). It's like listening to some old guy recount something that is really important to him, but he knows that serious things are most safely treated with soft mockery. Anyway, the sneaking increase of Shakespearean language styling is nice as a clear clue to the crazy, as is (my) eventual realisation that the excessive text-bookery of whale and whaling education chapters is the thumbprint of Ishmael's madness. It's why the book is so damn long and descriptive. He is attempting to catalogue all the impressions of the events of the Pequod in his mind. Like, have you ever sat down to write something, beginning with a short description of the set and staging and realised pages later that you are still singing the praises of the wallpaper and softly lit curtains and shit? Anyway, that's how I picture it....less
Read in May, 2008
Um. This is the weirdest, most outrageous book I've ever read. Using words like "classic" and "epic" and "desert-island-book" is just way too banal for this enormous, bizarre, utterly insane novel. I was in turn amused, bored, outraged, irritated, and charmed, but mostly blood-thirsty for the business of KILLING WHALES to begin.
Ishmael, in the first paragraph, says, "I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." Are...more
Um. This is the weirdest, most outrageous book I've ever read. Using words like "classic" and "epic" and "desert-island-book" is just way too banal for this enormous, bizarre, utterly insane novel. I was in turn amused, bored, outraged, irritated, and charmed, but mostly blood-thirsty for the business of KILLING WHALES to begin.
Ishmael, in the first paragraph, says, "I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." Are you kidding? Just take a little guided tour of the waterlands, that's all. No lunatics, wacko encyclopedic explanations of whale LAW, fake deaths, real corpses that reappear several days later with eyes popped out and strapped to a whale, strange chapters where everyone on ship breaks into song (all in appropriate dialects, of course), sleepy meditations on whale foreheads, and cozy bedding down with a dude who sells human heads and sleeps with a harpoon under his pillow.
I have no idea how you couldn't have a dramatic reaction to this book. Outrage, in fact, seems to me the only plausible reaction. It's like Melville sawed his leg off, dissected it, and used the parts to build a tiny living whale, which he kept alive by feeding his own blood. He calls his friends over to see it, and they are all like, "Oh, nice, classic, very epic. Well, time for dinner--see you later, Herm."
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Read in July, 2008
Everyone knows the story of this book, which is fine enough, but what really stuck with me were the small, sophisticated touches Melville makes. I was expecting more of a straight-ahead seafaring yarn with philosophical and allegorical overtones, but no. First of all, the characterization of the narrator was stunning. We spend a lot of time with him in the opening chapters, before he boards the ship, but he remains largely a cipher. We pick up a few tantalizing hints about his personality, mostl...more
Everyone knows the story of this book, which is fine enough, but what really stuck with me were the small, sophisticated touches Melville makes. I was expecting more of a straight-ahead seafaring yarn with philosophical and allegorical overtones, but no. First of all, the characterization of the narrator was stunning. We spend a lot of time with him in the opening chapters, before he boards the ship, but he remains largely a cipher. We pick up a few tantalizing hints about his personality, mostly regarding his violent, intermittent 
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