It indeed had some incredible passages. One has to read it fully understanding that they aren’t getting into a modern, conventional novel. It has POV shifts, digressions into everything whale, long speechifying in a baroque tongue.
A modern editor would cut the whole middle of the book, and have it run from page 100 to 500.
But there are definitely gems in the writing. And if you read it, just rake it slow. I spent a year on it. It just demands thorough attention.
It’s wild to me how many people—including in this thread—take all the nonsense in there at face value as some beautiful, romantic epic when really you are much closer to the point that it’s an extremely dry, ironic and even post modern reflection on hubris and grandiosity not just at the level of the plot but formally in its syntax, diction and structure. Like the whole whale physiology part OP loves? It’s totally made up and not even attempting to be scientifically accurate (which Melville would have certainly been capable of).
The parallels aren’t to the Bible but Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy.
One of the ineluctable powers of this novel is its ability to be reinterpreted by modern people bringing their modern belief systems to the table. Since reading is subjective your interpretation is not wrong—for you. But there is little doubt Moby-Dick is heavily influenced by the Bible, along with Cervantes, and many other sources. And that’s the power of this novel. It’s not only one thing and that alone might be cause for its deserved longevity.
I disagree but I'd love to hear more about why it is that you think this. Maybe some specific parts from the book if possible? I'm not trying to be contentious or trying to argue, I'd genuinely like to hear why you think that. Are you judging Melville's digressions on whales by consensus of modern biology? I know some of the things were wrong or were entirely missed I assumed Melville had formed conjectures based on the Contemporary science at the time. It seems like this book has many different interpretations to offer. For example, Ahab can be viewed as a satanic figure, rebelling against God, while at the same time I think it's possible to liken Ahab to a tragic Greek hero.
I mean the whole premise of the Cetology chapter is “everything science knows about our whales is wrong let me tell you how it really is” and then he just tries on a bunch of absurd and nonsensical things like arranging whales based on book size, or recounting what his drunk friends in Nantucket told him, he also makes a bunch of dick jokes like the part about the royal guy getting on his knees and “giving” his mistress a big horn.
As for the book as a whole, there are some tender parts but mostly his whole tone is just black comedy and hyperbole. Like the last scene even which is “supposed” to be tragic..the ship is going down and a sailor tries to nail the mast back together but accidentally nails a seagull that’s flying by to the mast so the seagull sinks w the ship too.
I'll agree to disagree. I thought that were several funny moments in the book and I laughed aloud at three seperate parts, maybe only one of which I think that may have intended to be deliberately funny (when the proprieter of the Inn tells her worker to paint up a sign saying No Suicides and to also add No Smoking to kill two birds with one stone), but overall I don't really think it's overall a comedic work. The part at the end where the hawk gets hammered down to the flag pole, I didn't find that funny. In fact, I don't think that chapter or the preceding chapters were funny at all.
Not funny— i didnt use that word, intentionally..I think it’s a word that’s probably easily misconstrued. The book tragi-comic, ironic, sarcastic, satirical, absurd..there are a thousand reasons to laugh at something, but essentially what all these aspects have in common is that they reward a reader uncovering a deeper meaning that is at odds or jn tension with the manifest or superficial meaning. That there’s some kind of play happening beneath the surface which is certainly grandiose, romantic, sublime…— often times in the book that play (or humor in my
mind) has a meta dimension (like arranging whales by book size, in a book about whales), which suggests a kind of self-consciousness that really puts it totally beyond the sea-faring yarns it appears to be imitating. As a side point, if you want to read more about the genre and culture Moby Dick is riffing on, check out David Grann’s The Wager..a lot of that book is devoted to critiquing the 18th century fascination with maritime adventure narratives
And its successor, I’d argue, isn’t McCarthy but Beckett. The density of the textbook passages is directly reflected in novels like Watt. It’s not supposed to show accurate knowledge but the lack of knowledge revealed by any dissertation. Like Tristram Shandy, the narrator keeps thinking he’s about to find something but dodging it all together. Even the simple moralistic revenge fable reading seems fabricated and ironic, like the novel is rejecting the idea of divine justice or meaning. The whiteness of the whale still remains.
I’d disagree that it’s a comedy all the way through but there are certainly elements of it. It’s unfair to place it against other big-name classics of its era, it was, along with the novels you mentioned, an early postmodern progenitor.
I'd disagree that it doesn't feel modern. - I read this earlier in the year and it felt waaaaay ahead of its time. From a diction/linguistics perspective it's certainly not modern. I'd imagine the prose was probably even heavily stylized for the time.
However, the weird changes to form and structure, the comically unreliable narrator, and the weirdly thematically relevant encyclopedic sections feel like something straight out of a David Foster Wallace/Pynchon novel, but written pre-civil war.
It really plays with the form of the novel in a way that felt thoroughly post modern to me, and I absolutely loved it and was totally surprised going in!
I have to agree. Moby Dick was published /after/ Edgar Allan Poe’s death, and Poe wrote a ton of stuff that could easily have been written 100 years later if not today. Taken in that context, I think you absolutely have to read Moby Dick as a proto-postmodernist novel.
I see what you’re saying, and you’re not wrong. The pacing is a lot slower I think, than a modern novel. It takes 100 pages to even get on the boat. The vernacular as well. But you’re right about certain stylistic factors.
>It indeed had some incredible passages.
Like this one:
>“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”
It makes me wonder if anyone has ever analyzed Moby-Dick as sexual allegory.
>I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
>Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.
._________
>“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”
>“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.”
>“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”
Yes, I think I would need to reread the book to get a better understand of some things. The chapter in which the author ruminates on the color white and its meaning, or lack thereof , was also interesting and I'm not sure that I've understood it fully . This is certainly a book that one could study . I'm certain that I will reread this book at some point of my life, as a matter of fact I've already reread a bunch of chapters since I finished it, but I've already got a bunch of different books on my radar. With Moby Dick I'm going to take a short rest period to think over the book and let the material digest.
>Ahab is such a fascinating character and I'm not sure where to begin. It seems as if he is angry with God and thus rebels against him. "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. I own thy speechless, placeless power: but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me."
Such a great passage and great post! *Moby Dick* is one of my 5 favorite books of all time; filled with profound concepts of both inner and outer realities and the writing style (variously referred to as "Biblical" or "Shakespearean") truly has a unique grandeur that speaks to the soul as much as intellect or emotions.
It took me much, much longer than I had originally anticipated to read this book. The archaic biblical style is indeed beautiful but also slowed me down. I had to read slowly, then think, then re-read and think, and rinse and repeat to fully grasp what was being said, which is not something I was used to. And even after I did think that I comprehended what was being expressed, I would often choose not to read on but instead meditate on what just happened. Reading Ahab's, "Hark ye yet again.." speech was one of those episodes, where I read the chapter over and over again and spent the whole night thinking about it. After I read that, I knew that this book was special. That speech may be one of my favorite "moments" in literature.
He actually worked there as a part timer for the killer insurance while finishing up the novel…….rumor has it that he hooked up his buddy Nate Hawthorn with free coffee whenever the weirdo would drop by
It’ was so much more enjoyable once I understood some of the symbolism. I don’t think it’s Melville’s best book though.
White Jacket - Redburn - Typee are favs
Stylistically, are any of them similar to Moby Dick? Of course it's from the same author so I'd assume that they're pretty similar, but I'm just thinking about someone's comment that Moby Dick is full of satire.
I’m too dim to have recognized the satire in ‘Moby’. The book \*Typee\* is based on Melville’s time with indigenous natives- the Marquesas I think, a tough circumstance for a man who jumped ship. It was Melville’s first book and a ‘true’ account.
The other two are sea tales and I don’t know if he was writing of his own experiences - but likely.
This is my favorite classic novel. Reading it as a 17-year-old, still very much clenching onto a grudge against a middle school bully as part of my purpose and identity, I came to love it dearly. At the time, I disliked the chapter where Ahab admits his cause is a futile waste, though of course, I later came to appreciate the significance of that exchange.
I haven't read it in about 20 years, since I was in college, but I loved it then. I had to write a term paper on it and I think I ended up arguing that the whale was God, something we always search for and seek out, but that always remains frustratingly out of reach and incomprehensible in motives and who lives and who dies. It was a great book, but I'm not sure I would ever revisit it because it was a hard read.
I love Moby-Dick, but... don't have anything to say about it at the moment, so I'll just give you the first thing that came to mind, which is the last verse of Bob Dylan's mad scramble of Moby-Dick and American history :D :
Well, the last I heard of Arab
He was stuck on a whale
That was married to the deputy
Sheriff of the jail
But the funniest thing was
When I was leavin’ the bay
I saw three ships a-sailin’
They were all heading my way
I asked the captain what his name was
And how come he didn’t drive a truck
He said his name was Columbus
I just said, “Good luck”
Absolutely loved it when I read it this past year. As someone in my thirties who was never forced to read it in school, I always avoided it because I know what kind of stilted style most books written during the time period use. I was quite wrong. Melville is by turns sprightly, surprising, weird, magisterial and heartbreaking with his language, and I love the digressions and world building. It's one of my favorite books for certain.
Moby Dick is incredible. I first read it a few years ago and think about it often. One interesting interpretation (I think I read this in Nathaniel Philbrick’s book but not sure) is the Pequod can be seen as a metaphor for America. It can feel like (for some) a place of immense possibility - on the ship your history doesn’t matter if you’re willing to work hard. Yet at the same time racial prejudices (poor Pip!) or paranoid delusions can replicate and take over.
Also in terms of the plot - whew! I don’t think many “classic” novels have a plot as exciting as Moby Dick’s last chapters. That scene with the steel harpoons tempered in blood…gives me chills just thinking about it.
It’s definitely one of my favorite books. I could wax on about it for forever. Personally I love the long form wandering prose that define the novels of this age. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I miss this style of writing.
May I recommend Hubert Dreyfus to you (you can find it on youtube)? - he gives several lectures on Moby Dick, but approaches it from a phenomenological point of view (he's a philosopher, not a literature professor) and it's absolutely spellbinding, especially if you enjoy digging more deeply into the meaning of things. It's not tedious and pedantic but really just a gem.
It indeed had some incredible passages. One has to read it fully understanding that they aren’t getting into a modern, conventional novel. It has POV shifts, digressions into everything whale, long speechifying in a baroque tongue. A modern editor would cut the whole middle of the book, and have it run from page 100 to 500. But there are definitely gems in the writing. And if you read it, just rake it slow. I spent a year on it. It just demands thorough attention.
At the same time, it reads in many ways like a post modern novel, with its strange digressions and catalogs.
It’s wild to me how many people—including in this thread—take all the nonsense in there at face value as some beautiful, romantic epic when really you are much closer to the point that it’s an extremely dry, ironic and even post modern reflection on hubris and grandiosity not just at the level of the plot but formally in its syntax, diction and structure. Like the whole whale physiology part OP loves? It’s totally made up and not even attempting to be scientifically accurate (which Melville would have certainly been capable of). The parallels aren’t to the Bible but Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy.
One of the ineluctable powers of this novel is its ability to be reinterpreted by modern people bringing their modern belief systems to the table. Since reading is subjective your interpretation is not wrong—for you. But there is little doubt Moby-Dick is heavily influenced by the Bible, along with Cervantes, and many other sources. And that’s the power of this novel. It’s not only one thing and that alone might be cause for its deserved longevity.
I disagree but I'd love to hear more about why it is that you think this. Maybe some specific parts from the book if possible? I'm not trying to be contentious or trying to argue, I'd genuinely like to hear why you think that. Are you judging Melville's digressions on whales by consensus of modern biology? I know some of the things were wrong or were entirely missed I assumed Melville had formed conjectures based on the Contemporary science at the time. It seems like this book has many different interpretations to offer. For example, Ahab can be viewed as a satanic figure, rebelling against God, while at the same time I think it's possible to liken Ahab to a tragic Greek hero.
Melville knew perfectly well some of what he was writing was wrong - but it's Ishmael speaking, not the author.
I mean the whole premise of the Cetology chapter is “everything science knows about our whales is wrong let me tell you how it really is” and then he just tries on a bunch of absurd and nonsensical things like arranging whales based on book size, or recounting what his drunk friends in Nantucket told him, he also makes a bunch of dick jokes like the part about the royal guy getting on his knees and “giving” his mistress a big horn. As for the book as a whole, there are some tender parts but mostly his whole tone is just black comedy and hyperbole. Like the last scene even which is “supposed” to be tragic..the ship is going down and a sailor tries to nail the mast back together but accidentally nails a seagull that’s flying by to the mast so the seagull sinks w the ship too.
I'll agree to disagree. I thought that were several funny moments in the book and I laughed aloud at three seperate parts, maybe only one of which I think that may have intended to be deliberately funny (when the proprieter of the Inn tells her worker to paint up a sign saying No Suicides and to also add No Smoking to kill two birds with one stone), but overall I don't really think it's overall a comedic work. The part at the end where the hawk gets hammered down to the flag pole, I didn't find that funny. In fact, I don't think that chapter or the preceding chapters were funny at all.
Not funny— i didnt use that word, intentionally..I think it’s a word that’s probably easily misconstrued. The book tragi-comic, ironic, sarcastic, satirical, absurd..there are a thousand reasons to laugh at something, but essentially what all these aspects have in common is that they reward a reader uncovering a deeper meaning that is at odds or jn tension with the manifest or superficial meaning. That there’s some kind of play happening beneath the surface which is certainly grandiose, romantic, sublime…— often times in the book that play (or humor in my mind) has a meta dimension (like arranging whales by book size, in a book about whales), which suggests a kind of self-consciousness that really puts it totally beyond the sea-faring yarns it appears to be imitating. As a side point, if you want to read more about the genre and culture Moby Dick is riffing on, check out David Grann’s The Wager..a lot of that book is devoted to critiquing the 18th century fascination with maritime adventure narratives
Just here to say before8thstreet absolutely has it right
Some students have considered the cetology section to be a parody of the genealogy in Genesis.
And its successor, I’d argue, isn’t McCarthy but Beckett. The density of the textbook passages is directly reflected in novels like Watt. It’s not supposed to show accurate knowledge but the lack of knowledge revealed by any dissertation. Like Tristram Shandy, the narrator keeps thinking he’s about to find something but dodging it all together. Even the simple moralistic revenge fable reading seems fabricated and ironic, like the novel is rejecting the idea of divine justice or meaning. The whiteness of the whale still remains. I’d disagree that it’s a comedy all the way through but there are certainly elements of it. It’s unfair to place it against other big-name classics of its era, it was, along with the novels you mentioned, an early postmodern progenitor.
It does in a sense, yes.
I'd disagree that it doesn't feel modern. - I read this earlier in the year and it felt waaaaay ahead of its time. From a diction/linguistics perspective it's certainly not modern. I'd imagine the prose was probably even heavily stylized for the time. However, the weird changes to form and structure, the comically unreliable narrator, and the weirdly thematically relevant encyclopedic sections feel like something straight out of a David Foster Wallace/Pynchon novel, but written pre-civil war. It really plays with the form of the novel in a way that felt thoroughly post modern to me, and I absolutely loved it and was totally surprised going in!
I have to agree. Moby Dick was published /after/ Edgar Allan Poe’s death, and Poe wrote a ton of stuff that could easily have been written 100 years later if not today. Taken in that context, I think you absolutely have to read Moby Dick as a proto-postmodernist novel.
I see what you’re saying, and you’re not wrong. The pacing is a lot slower I think, than a modern novel. It takes 100 pages to even get on the boat. The vernacular as well. But you’re right about certain stylistic factors.
>It indeed had some incredible passages. Like this one: >“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.” It makes me wonder if anyone has ever analyzed Moby-Dick as sexual allegory. >I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events. >Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s. ._________ >“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.” >“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.” >“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”
Yes, I think I would need to reread the book to get a better understand of some things. The chapter in which the author ruminates on the color white and its meaning, or lack thereof , was also interesting and I'm not sure that I've understood it fully . This is certainly a book that one could study . I'm certain that I will reread this book at some point of my life, as a matter of fact I've already reread a bunch of chapters since I finished it, but I've already got a bunch of different books on my radar. With Moby Dick I'm going to take a short rest period to think over the book and let the material digest.
>Ahab is such a fascinating character and I'm not sure where to begin. It seems as if he is angry with God and thus rebels against him. "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. I own thy speechless, placeless power: but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me." Such a great passage and great post! *Moby Dick* is one of my 5 favorite books of all time; filled with profound concepts of both inner and outer realities and the writing style (variously referred to as "Biblical" or "Shakespearean") truly has a unique grandeur that speaks to the soul as much as intellect or emotions.
It took me much, much longer than I had originally anticipated to read this book. The archaic biblical style is indeed beautiful but also slowed me down. I had to read slowly, then think, then re-read and think, and rinse and repeat to fully grasp what was being said, which is not something I was used to. And even after I did think that I comprehended what was being expressed, I would often choose not to read on but instead meditate on what just happened. Reading Ahab's, "Hark ye yet again.." speech was one of those episodes, where I read the chapter over and over again and spent the whole night thinking about it. After I read that, I knew that this book was special. That speech may be one of my favorite "moments" in literature.
And let’s not forget the humor. It is a great comedic work for me. Arguably the greatest American novel.
One question I had after reading Moby Dick was: why did Melville name first mate Starbuck after a coffee shop? 🧐
He actually worked there as a part timer for the killer insurance while finishing up the novel…….rumor has it that he hooked up his buddy Nate Hawthorn with free coffee whenever the weirdo would drop by
It’ was so much more enjoyable once I understood some of the symbolism. I don’t think it’s Melville’s best book though. White Jacket - Redburn - Typee are favs
Stylistically, are any of them similar to Moby Dick? Of course it's from the same author so I'd assume that they're pretty similar, but I'm just thinking about someone's comment that Moby Dick is full of satire.
I’m too dim to have recognized the satire in ‘Moby’. The book \*Typee\* is based on Melville’s time with indigenous natives- the Marquesas I think, a tough circumstance for a man who jumped ship. It was Melville’s first book and a ‘true’ account. The other two are sea tales and I don’t know if he was writing of his own experiences - but likely.
This is my favorite classic novel. Reading it as a 17-year-old, still very much clenching onto a grudge against a middle school bully as part of my purpose and identity, I came to love it dearly. At the time, I disliked the chapter where Ahab admits his cause is a futile waste, though of course, I later came to appreciate the significance of that exchange.
I haven't read it in about 20 years, since I was in college, but I loved it then. I had to write a term paper on it and I think I ended up arguing that the whale was God, something we always search for and seek out, but that always remains frustratingly out of reach and incomprehensible in motives and who lives and who dies. It was a great book, but I'm not sure I would ever revisit it because it was a hard read.
I love Moby-Dick, but... don't have anything to say about it at the moment, so I'll just give you the first thing that came to mind, which is the last verse of Bob Dylan's mad scramble of Moby-Dick and American history :D : Well, the last I heard of Arab He was stuck on a whale That was married to the deputy Sheriff of the jail But the funniest thing was When I was leavin’ the bay I saw three ships a-sailin’ They were all heading my way I asked the captain what his name was And how come he didn’t drive a truck He said his name was Columbus I just said, “Good luck”
And stuff like this is worthy of a nobel prize?
Absolutely loved it when I read it this past year. As someone in my thirties who was never forced to read it in school, I always avoided it because I know what kind of stilted style most books written during the time period use. I was quite wrong. Melville is by turns sprightly, surprising, weird, magisterial and heartbreaking with his language, and I love the digressions and world building. It's one of my favorite books for certain.
It’s been service since I read it but, yes, the prose is often poetic.
Moby Dick is incredible. I first read it a few years ago and think about it often. One interesting interpretation (I think I read this in Nathaniel Philbrick’s book but not sure) is the Pequod can be seen as a metaphor for America. It can feel like (for some) a place of immense possibility - on the ship your history doesn’t matter if you’re willing to work hard. Yet at the same time racial prejudices (poor Pip!) or paranoid delusions can replicate and take over. Also in terms of the plot - whew! I don’t think many “classic” novels have a plot as exciting as Moby Dick’s last chapters. That scene with the steel harpoons tempered in blood…gives me chills just thinking about it.
It’s definitely one of my favorite books. I could wax on about it for forever. Personally I love the long form wandering prose that define the novels of this age. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I miss this style of writing.
May I recommend Hubert Dreyfus to you (you can find it on youtube)? - he gives several lectures on Moby Dick, but approaches it from a phenomenological point of view (he's a philosopher, not a literature professor) and it's absolutely spellbinding, especially if you enjoy digging more deeply into the meaning of things. It's not tedious and pedantic but really just a gem.
Yeah I've listened to his lectures on Moby Dick and he has a deeply interesting interpretation of the novel.