Moby Dick

I loved Moby Dick! I hated Moby Dick!

I read Moby Dick for my own personal enjoyment. I know this is a work I would have gotten more out of if I'd read it as part of a group. But I read through it for myself and my review reflects those views.

First things first: Herman Melville's writing was often beautiful. I will read more of his work.

The book starts off strong and finishes strong, with a breathless three day duel with the dreaded Moby Dick. In between there are countless memorable scenes and moments. Nailing up the dubloon. Ahab's moment of self-doubt/sanity. Even some of the detailed whaling chapters that everyone seems to hate are super interesting.

The problem I had was all the endless, metaphysical rambling. We get an entire show more chapter on the importance of Moby Dick being white when it feels like a couple of paragraphs would suffice.

I understand, I was reading this the same way I would read any other adventure novel and that isn't what Melville wanted. Without the endless metaphysical noodling, Moby Dick likely wouldn't be held in the regard it is now. But man oh man, it took me just over a month to get through this not terribly long book.

And even when I was sick to death of the philosophical, there was so much good stuff. Ishmael and Quequeeg's friendship. The clash between Ahab and Starbuck and even those whaling scenes, showing the crew extract the oil. All good stuff.

It was a tough read, but I'm glad I read it. Complaints aside, I already miss the book. show less

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but here's my take. Just finished this book and my brain is on fire (in a good way) and my mind is blown.

Beautiful novel.

Sure it requires some patience. Sure you have to slog through a few chapters on cetology. But don't let that stop you. The chapters are short, and what nobody told me is that Melville ties in the human condition at the end of many of these chapters.

Also, that's part of the beauty of the book. The obsession, the madness, the struggle of any human endeavor. Trying to find meaning in the meaningless.Trying to gain knowledge in an unknowable world.

It's Shakespearean in its grandeur. It's poetic. Melville was a genius. You could come close to earning your PhD just from following show more and studying the allusions in the book. It would require multiple readings to take it all in.

If you're a patient reader; if you're an intelligent reader - don't let the negative reviews or horror stories you've heard scare you off from reading as they did me. Don't put it off any longer. show less

Moby Dick is certainly not a read for the faint of heart. One fun idea is to spot all the modern references lifted from this novel. Ones I spotted right away were from Jaws, Battlestar Galactica and a couple of Star Trek movies.

Joking aside, while Melville doesn’t always write in the easiest style and many of the references he uses are now obscure, his writing is still beautiful. The passage where he discusses the whiteness of the whale, comparing it to the whiteness of other animals was beautiful and delicately described. The relationship between Ismael and Queequeg was funny and very engaging. Of course the heart of the novel is Captain Ahab and his total obsession with hunting down and killing Moby Dick. No matter what the cost to show more himself or his crew. His commander Starbuck is truly a tragic figure. Starbuck can see that Ahab’s obsession has really crossed over to madness. But his loyalty to ship and crew make it impossible for him to take any action against his captain. Ahab’s constant question to each ship he encounters ‘have ye encountered the white whale’ is haunting.

I can’t lie that some of the minutia of the internal anatomy of a whale or descriptions of whaling didn’t drag the story down for me at times. My take on this level of detail was that it was Melville’s way of describing an animal and a way of life that almost no one of that era would experience. And in a world without the Discovery Channel or the Internet, he was using these descriptions to build an image of this oceangoing life to a mostly landlocked readership. show less

This was my second attempt to read what many consider to be "The Great American Novel", and I am happy to report that I have succeeded, at least if success can be defined as getting through the entire book. On my first attempt several years ago I managed to get about ten percent of the way in before I abandoned it and moved on to another tome.

There are books that you can't put down, or don't want to come to an end, that command your attention once you get into it from start to finish. Moby Dick was not one of them. I proceeded at a glacial pace averaging about ten pages a day over the course of seven weeks. I would yield to any distraction that arose to put the book down and read almost none of it at night for fear of dozing off too show more early and having to plow through the same chapters again.

That said, I was aware all the time that I was in the presence of greatness and not just on account of its reputation. In order to come close to realizing in full the greatness of the novel it would take me at least another two readings, but this is not a voyage for which I am likely to sign up.

There were several factors that made this book such a chore for me. First of all is the difficulty I had with the nautical terminology and language which is alien to my experience. (I know port vs. starboard and bow vs. stern and that's about it as far as ships are concerned.) Even more obscure are the technical details specific to whaling ships and whaling in general. Finally, there was the collection of chapters interspersed throughout the novel that comprise effectively an encyclopedia of whales.

For those readers who are conversant or comfortable with ships, whales and whaling there are detailed descriptions of all of the operations associated with the whaling enterprise and its subject matter. These comprise at least half of the text. For those readers are are conversant or comfortable with Biblical allusions, predominantly from the Old Testament, and mythology, primarily Greek, there are fertile grounds for you to fish in. If none of the above is your dish, you are likely to struggle.

Given the size of Moby Dick (the novel not the White Whale) it takes a great commitment to research all the Biblical and mythological references. In as much as this was not part of an undergraduate or graduate syllabus I declined for the most part to make the required effort. Obviously, Ishmael was the bastard son of Abraham via his bond servant Hagar. Ahab, who I did look up, was one of the kings of Israel (not including the kingdom of Judea) who took up worship of the pagan god Baal at the urging of his wife. I was inspired by the title of Chapter 95, The Cassock, to look up the references in the first Book of Kings to Queen Maachah in Judea who was deposed for idol worship by her son King Asa. Read the chapter, then look up the reference, if you enjoy a bit of blasphemy on the side.

Among the curious features of the novel, the principal character, Ahab, does not make an appearance until Chapter 28 and it is not until Chapter 36, about thirty percent of the way through the book, that he makes his great speech informing the crew of the true objective of the voyage and like Henry V rouses them to embrace their task and their fate. The Pequod does not encounter a whale of any kind until midway through the story, and the White Whale himself, does not show up until the final three chapters (out of 135).

There is no gainsaying that Moby Dick has its moments that are reminiscent of Shakespeare and Milton both in eloquence and its universal themes. A full appreciation demands the dedication, effort and skill of an Ahab. I fear that my encounter with the White Whale is inspired more by the spirit of first mate Starbuck whose pursuit is moderate in spirit and unwilling to make an already extremely hazardous voyage into a suicide mission.

Unlike poor Starbuck, I finished off the great fish. But he did achieve a taste of immortality in the form of a nationwide chain of overpriced coffee shops. show less

It's hard to think of five more suggestive words in the English language than Hast seen the white whale? Except maybe "it's hard to think of".

I love Moby-Dick for its all-englobing salty-universe universality, the mobility of its prose, the heftiness of its humour, the bigness of its ambiguousness.

I love Melville's octosyllabicisms like "uninterpenetratingly" and his gallumphing vocab choices in general. Pestiferously, unensanguined, squilgee, crappo, jibboom. I love how Melville's like "get bent Linaeus, whales are fish" and how at one point he calls fish "the finny tribes".

I love Tashtego being reborn Athena-like from the head of the whale.

Ebonness, sharkish, quoggy, tawn. And lashings and lashings of sperm, glorious sperm.

Questo libro è la storia di una dannazione. Il capitano Ahab decide di dedicare la propria sfida e immolare la sua anima ad un compito di odio: uccidere un Nemico impersonale, eterno ed anche invisibile, nonostante la sua grossa presenza. Ahab non è soltanto un cacciatore vendicativo, la sua può essere considerata quasi una devozione, una missione, un compito implacabile, quasi per giustificare quella che poi sarà la sua dannazione. Melville scrisse in una lettera al suo amico Hawthorne: "Ho scritto un libro malvagio, ma io mi sento come un agnello". La balena bianca, enorme per grandezza e anche per dignità ed orrore, manifesta la sua potenza odiosa con la sua presenza costante, odiosa sì ma anche solenne, una divinità inferiore show more e sopraumana, quasi una divinità, di cui bisogna parlare sempre, sulla quale scorrono leggende e sulla quale bisogna versare un odio devoto. Non è un dio che si propone alla ragione o all'animo cristiano. In essa confluisce qualcosa simile ad un dio puritano, un nume selvatico, maligno, necessario, animale grandissimo che bisogna uccidere per poi nutrirsi di esso. Un libro questo che va letto e riletto .... show less

!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!

The early and very critical reviews of “Moby Dick” (or The Whale) only speak to Herman Melville’s literary genius. Innovation isn’t always met with success… he hadn’t failed a generation, the generation failed him.

Melville’s dark satirical approach to a tragedy is one of the first of its time also one of first examples of true character writing. As for the ending… readers held Melville to a promise he never made. This story never promised a hero. He illustrated a legend, a tale of a great ghost that haunts many seamen, many like Ahab, who have chased and failed… and Melville knew, that legends can’t die.