Moby Dick

“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for it the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

The following contains massive, detailed spoilers for every single aspect of the 1851 novel Moby Dick, including the very end.

I’ve had a copy of Moby Dick sitting on my shelf for years, waiting for its moment; and in late 2024, its moment finally came. For background, I’m a huge fan of 19th century British literature but I’ve had a severe prejudice against 19th century American literature for most of my life, mostly because reading “The Scarlet Letter” in 8th grade made me want to never read anything ever again. Eventually I decided to re-evaluate these authors as an adult. I read Seven Gables and Nathaniel Hawthorne and I became friends. Can Herman Melville and I be friends too? Let’s find out.

I was blessedly unspoiled for this novel. I knew a few of the characters’ names, and that they were hunting a mysterious white whale named Moby Dick, and I had a general sense that things were not going to turn out well for anyone involved, that’s it. I was reading this for vibes and I only looked up background information when I was curious about something technical/historical.

(As you most likely know), our story begins with Ishmael, who is bored and broke and dangerously impulsive, deciding to sign on to a whaling ship for a few years, which is kind of like buying a ticket to a cruise where the main attractions are Hardship and Misery, but no judgment here Ishmael. His decision is also motivated by meeting Queequeg, who is my absolute favorite character so we’re going to stop a minute and fangirl him.

We meet Queequeg after he spends the night selling shrunken heads about town. He doesn’t expect Ishmael as a roommate and briefly tries to kill him, before spooning him all night. Let me make my bias clear here: I believe they are in love and I ship them. There is certainly a lot going on in this relationship and I’m not knowledgeable enough to dissect it properly and place it within the context of the time and place the novel was written. But it is incredibly sweet and also homoerotic as hell. Ishmael refers to Queequeg as his husband. He is constantly describing Queequeg as basically the coolest, sexiest, bravest person he’s ever met. I can see Ishmael in my head, kicking his heels and twirling his hair like a schoolgirl, watching his husband harpoon a whale.

But Queequeg is actually that fucking cool. He wears whatever the hell he wants (often nothing at all). He does whatever the hell he wants (and it’s usually badass). He has awesome tattoos AND he’s a cannibal. According to Ishmael that is, Queequeg never self-identifies as a cannibal as far as I can remember; he doesn't get to speak a lot at all actually. He describes himself as a descendant of a royal family from an isolated island (described by Ishmael as “far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are,” but which is also definitely in Polynesia somewhere) who wanted to visit Christendom out of curiosity. I am certainly not equipped to fully analyze the racism of the novel or even its commentary on racism and colonialism, there are layers here that my 21st century brain cannot interpret without help. (However, I do also think that Melville may just have had a bit of a cannibalism fetish, which is relateable.)

Our other characters of note: – Ahab (of course): Perhaps one of the most angsty characters I’ve ever read. His emo levels are off the charts and I am saying this as someone who listens to The Black Parade on a daily basis. His hobbies are 1) monologuing, 2) staring at the ocean and brooding.

– Starbuck (first mate): The only sane person on the ship; the human character in a sea of Muppets.

– Stubb (second mate): Stubb is a wild card and his scenes are where you see Melville’s savage sense of humor really shine. He is also an absolute asshole.

– Fedallah (harpooneer): Ahab’s secret weapon. He’s mysterious (terribly mysterious) and everyone is terrified of him. Turns out that they were at least a little correct to be terrified.

– Pip (cabin boy): Pip barely gets anything to do before Stubb leaves him in the ocean and he goes insane. Is there a more tragic character? He's just a kid?? Every moment after he goes mad is haunting. Ahab is the tormented soul of the novel and Pip is its broken heart.

Ok, so the experience of reading this book is like someone giving you an extremely thorough lecture about whales and the whaling industry (with the latest and finest scientific knowledge available in 1851), pausing every so often to direct your attention to something incredibly bizarre happening within the story on the Pequod.

And these whaling lectures can absolutely be boring, but they aren’t necessarily so. It wasn’t as boring or annoying to me as some other infodumpting authors (it's not like Victor Hugo going on about the Parisian sewers in Les Miserables, shut the FUCK UP about the sewers Victor Hugo oh my god get an editor), probably because Melville is a hell of a writer and he cannot write anything without layering it with interesting context and ideas and asides. And then out of nowhere he’ll tie everything up with some philosophical musings that will absolutely knock the wind out of you.

Back on the Pequod, the tone of our story varies wildly. The vignettes can be serious or action-packed or tragic but they’re often just hilarious. It’s like Melville is throwing out every single wild story he’s overheard during his seafaring career, leading up to the big one. Of course it is also occasionally incredibly violent, and I’m very sensitive to violence against animals so parts of this book were very tough for me. But these scenes are absolutely essential, and Ishmael’s reverence for whales and his reverence for the industry dedicated to butchering them somehow didn’t feel contradictory at all. Melville is nothing if not brilliant at bringing out the beauty within brutality.

And all of this time, Melville is throwing out some of the best prose I’ve ever read in my entire life. I stopped bookmarking quotes I liked with post-its because I was marking every other page. That Moby Dick quote bot exists for a reason. It’s just banger after banger. Melville is the king of ending a chapter with something so moving and profound or silly and absurd that I often just had to put the book down and stare into space for a while.

They traverse almost the entire globe and Ahab is profoundly uninterested in anything except the White Whale. A lot of bizarre shit is happening all around him but he does not care in the least; all the angels of heaven could descend and do a little dance and all he would do is ask “Moby Dick, have ye seen him?” When we finally enter the Pacific, the tone starts to darken. We’ve spent 600 pages with these guys and we have no white whale in sight. Everything is getting oppressively and almost unbearably ominous. Ahab is granted so many signs and so many opportunities to turn back. The encounter with the ship Rachel, where he refuses to help search for the Captain's lost son, is the final nail in his own coffin.

It's difficult to say Ahab is insane at this point. Monomaniacal. Overly-committed. Struggles with anger issues. But he is fully aware of what he is doing and what it is costing him and his crew. I think he believes he will kill Moby Dick, but he knows it will cost him everything. I'm not sure if he thinks it will cost his crew everything; I don't think he even cared until near the end. Taking Pip in seemed like a turning point for him. And that wonderful last conversation with Starbuck – Ahab’s last, best chance to turn back – in which they acknowledge their own mutual damnation. But what choice does he really have? “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”

I'm sure in the recesses of my brain I knew exactly how this book ended. It's very difficult to imagine it ending any other way. It happens so quickly and yet seemed to unfold so slowly, so inevitably, so horrifically. Ahab and I realized that his ship was the second hearse from Fedallah’s prophecy at the same time and I read the rest of the book in breathless horror. It seems so melodramatic when you look back on it (the rope, the bird, the coffin) but it felt sublime and perfect.

There is nothing on this earth like reading a book you truly love for the very first time. I expected to tolerate this book at best, and instead I don't even have a word for how I feel about it. (Awe, adoration?) I'm glad I waited until this point in my life to read it. I’m glad I went slowly and that I didn’t stop to take notes or do research as I went, I will do that on the next read. 2024 was a wretched year and reading this has broken and healed me in strange unexpected ways. So yes, Herman and I are now besties.

I read this over the course of about 6 months as a group read. 5-10 of us would meet for an hour a week and take turns reading chapters. It's a very enjoyable experience that way, and at the same time I don't think I'd even have finished the book if I'd tried to read it alone.

Apart from being notoriously long, it's full of meandering digressions many of which would probably have lost me. And the tone of the writing is dominated by the pomposity of the narrator, which at times is used for great effect but at others just grates. It's also extremely wordily heavy. I realise that some of this is just the literary English of the time, but Melville was well capable of using that style to dramatic effect, like in Bartleby which I found a total page-turner, or some of my favourite individual chapters of Moby-Dick which would have been great stand-alone novellas. And while I suspect it was racially progressive for a novel written by a white USian back then, from any other perspective it's infuriatingly racist.

So why still a classic? Well, it does manage to conjure up a world, in which it tells a story that's simultaneously very small (one boat hunting one whale) and huge (an epic journey for that crew; a microcosm of whaling as a whole), with some very vividly rendered characters along the way, and much more comedy than I expected from the way people talk about this book.

I was quite surprised how easy a read this was. I tried reading [b:Frankenstein|35031085|Frankenstein|Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498841231l/35031085.SY75.jpg|4836639] once and got bored, expected the same here and was plesantly surprised by Melville’s much more enjoyable writing style.

I was also surprised by how rational Ahab acts. Yes, he wants to take revenge on Moby Dick. But most of the time he is just a captain on a whale ship that hunts whales for profit.
The obsessive things he does are, apart from the oath bit and talking about the whale a lot, mostly limited to once threatening Starbuck when he demands a delay to save the valuable oil – and then delaying the hunt anyway – and then actually going out in the boats on days two and three, when the days before have shown how dangerous it was. I had expected more howling madness.

And, yes, this is more a book on whaling than an action novel. But i found the details rather interesting. And at times the asides are a bit rambling. I don’t agree with the notorious¹ “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter. I don’t think a polar bear is more frightening because of its color, it being a giant, fierce bear makes it scary enough. Still even that chapter was interesting.
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¹My mother warned me about that. Seriously. “Oh no! Don’t read Moby Dick! It’s too long! There is a chapter about how the color white is evil.” Actually, that is not even what Ishmael says in that chapter.

A fun, fast paced, and light hearted science-fantasty in space with dastardly villains and classic heroes! I love the ships in this, and the space battles are excellent!
I have to admit however, I liked book 1 better, because the humans in book 2 detracted from the fun. I had issues with them, the captain most of all.
The captain Serengeti mourned for in book 1 is...well he suffers in a state of dated, toxic behaviour so thick I just couldn't get why sweet, smart, powerful Serengeti puts up with it. Why he is presented as a 'hero' at all.
He doesn't want help when he's injured ("Last thing I need is some damned nursemaid fawning all over me."), doesn't really value book learning ("Math? What math? What the hell does math have to do with any of this?"...they are discussing navigation and orbits in space which is uh, very involved with math), uses questionable slurs ("Pansy-ass coward"), and judges people on their waistline ("Guy that fat's been workin' a desk for a while, which means he's pompous and self-important").
It was so off-putting it took me four months to finish the book - drawn back by Serengeti, and repelled by the captain over and over. BUT I am glad I did finish it - the ending is full of lovely lovely space battles.

What do I think about such an epic, Iliad and Odyssey combined, in a 19th century leviathanic novel of such proportions? Would I dare to add something of my own to such a renowned work?

This is not the kind of book you would grasp at first reading; and this was my first. There’s simply too much content for a fly-by reading such as mine to take it fully. There is simply too much, way too much to even venture a justifiable review.

With all that out of the way, the only thing I can add is the personal remark about if reading a book of such a magnitude is worthy of the time and patience to delve into this almost unknown world of the past. Is it? Is this time well spent? I believe it is; that if you don’t mind coming up to the same conclusion as I did that one reading is not enough and one reading just gives you a glimpse of what’s underneath this mythical tale of man against nature.

When all else is considered; when you understand that only by taking it whole you can at least gain some reverence for the work and the genius behind it, you may come to the same conclusion that I did: it was worthy of my time; it was time well spent. Now I have to lay it dormant and hope the seeds I now planted may grow into something more insightful in the future. “There she blows!” (MELVILLE, 1851): maybe next time I'll give this whale a proper hunt.