does it really need editing?

[Jason]

Just asking the obvious question here. :)

Melville wrote a handful of novels (as I'm sure you know). Only this one is a sprawling, beautiful mess. Doesn't that suggest that this stretching out was done on purpose, rather than just being an artifact of the 19th century, as this edition's blurb suggests?

When I read Moby Dick in high school, I loved it. I loved its sprawling digressions, its inconsistent themes and styles, its pages of whale quotations. The effect of reading such an all-encompassing treatment is to approach a feeling of universality, as if this novel contains the entire universe, or at least the whole 19th-century maritime universe. In fact, the more I plunged through this behemoth, the more it began to feel like a behemoth, a whale itself. This was the first time that I realized that the shape and structure of a novel can relate thematically to its contents. It was my introduction to a very modern idea.

Anyway, I think all of this would have been lost on me if I had just read "the good parts". No disrespect intended: the editor clearly knows the original Moby Dick much better than I, and I trust this was something of a labor of love. I don't question its intent, but its effect.

-Jason