Moby Dick

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Moby Dick

The challenge of reading the classic novel, one that was written before the invention of the typewriter…

624 pages of a story that can be broken down pretty simply. A young man goes on a whaling ship with a madman, Captain Ahab… who is hell bent of getting revenge for the injury given to him by a white whale they have named Moby-Dick. That Captain Ahab never gives up, and can never be talked out of this mission; that he will sacrifice his whole crew to get revenge on a creature who cannot have a rational understanding of his actions, speaks more about the folly of mankind than anything else. We are a small, petty people. And we are capable of blind rage and single-minded focus at the expense of everything. It is no wonder that Moby-Dick is a template for all themes of revenge and the futility of it…why Star Trek used it multiple times…and why the White Whale is a metaphor for a thing you seek that remains just outside your grasp.

But first you have to deal with the nuts and bolts of Melville’s prose. As a modern reader, and a reader of more modern books, I see a book that was not restrained by editing or flow. Melville writes whatever he thinks is important, even if it isn’t (trust me, you do not need to know this much about whales, maybe just watch Star Trek 4). Many short chapters are taken to explain some facet of whales or whaling or biblical stories. 100 pages in, and you still aren’t even in the water.

That’s just how the book is.

We follow the story of a young man, Ishmael, who becomes odd fast friends with a ‘savage’ named Queequeg, who shares a room and a bed with our narrator. Ishmael’s motive is to travel the world in the only way he can: as an employee, sailing on a whaling ship.

It is just his misfortune that the Captain of the whaling ship is the one-legged Captain Ahab. A man who makes no bones about what he wants. Following the writing dictum of Kurt Vonnegut (Who wasn’t born yet when this was written), your character has to want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.

Ahab wants the white whale. He is the originator of the white whale metaphor. And 100 or more chapters of varying length and nautical terms and old-timey language, we get there.

I won’t lie…it’s a slog. I skipped many of the footnotes, I groaned at some of the more egregious explanations (the one about the color white just kills me). It could benefit from a modern edit which would savagely take 200-300 pages out and distill it to something faster paced and exciting (I have the graphic novel of same story in my reading queue). But cutting some slack…this was 1851…and Melville was probably given leeway by the fact that he was a writer and people actually read books back then.

But the story is both timeless and a throwback to when whaling was a way of life and a ticket to see the world while living in cramped quarters with questionable people. Take what you want from it. It is both a difficult read and an easy one. The short chapters help. I skipped pages at times because they didn’t seem like they mattered. I skipped footnotes altogether. I am told that the writing style was more confessional than was common at the time.

But Moby Dick is a classic…who am I to say otherwise?

This book was written in my hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at a place called Arrowhead which I’ve never actually bothered to visit. Maybe I will now.





View all my reviews