“Moby-Dick” (1851) by Herman Melville tells the tale of Captain Ahab’s hunt of Moby Dick, the Great White Whale.
Disclaimer: This post is written by me, a reader of books, not a literary critic.
Readability: It has a famous opening – “Call me Ishmael” – and a shattering end. In between are philosophical musings, bits of fine writing, and clear-as-mud stuff like, oh, this sentence from chapter 60 about the rope attached to a harpoon:
“From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp – the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.”
He also likes to explain one thing in terms of something even less well known.
Cultural literacy: Part of what makes it hard to read is that Melville assumes a knowledge of sailing ships and the Bible that are not common this side of 1945. Sometimes a Bible dictionary is more helpful than an ordinary dictionary. I watched a video on YouTube about the parts of a pirate ship. It was invaluable. So was seeing clips from the Gregory Peck film. But an illustrated and annotated edition would be better still.
Like the Bible it is a slog, but worth it in the end. You just have to stick with it. Do not expect to understand everything on a first reading. Especially since surface events often have a deeper meaning. Both the Bible and Melville are like that.
I can see why my English teachers gushed over it: it is full of alliterations and allusions, which they were suckers for. And it is written in that wordy, we-got-all-day way of the Victorians. It ain’t Hemingway – who, by the way, imparted knowledge about bull fights way more painlessly than Melville does about whale hunts.
Captain Ahab comes across as half mad – a “monomaniac” is Ishmael’s term for it. Ahab is bent on revenge against Moby Dick, who bit off his leg, and he puts himself on the level with the gods (always plural and lower-case from his mouth). Hardly a sympathetic character, at least from a Christian point of view. And yet somehow your heart (well, at least mine) breaks for him by the end. That is brilliant.
Race: Ahab’s three harpooners aboard the Pequod, his “knights”, are all “savages” or “heathens” – an African, a Polynesian and a Native American. Ishmael and Ahab admire them for their courage and skill. But Melville likens them to devils in hell. From chapter 96:
“the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers … With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath … the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse [of a whale], and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”
– Abagond, 2022.
See also:
- books
- cetology in Moby-Dick
- English in 1851 – quotes a bit of it
- words:
529
don’t get stuck to the whale you harpoon!
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My thought about the ending is that it is, rather than shattering, instead, predictable. Of course, Ishmael lives. We already know that. He’s around to tell the story. Right?
Beyond that though, there is a reason why he lives and the rest of the crew doesn’t. All of the rest of them are all-in. He’s along for the ride. He says so right in the beginning. Doesn’t he?
Right after “Call me Ishamel,” he says, “Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
You see, he’s just there to “sail about,” and the rest are warriors in the primal battle between whale and man, primal because it was fought with low tech weapons, and – sometimes – the whale won. That’s why there was a story. Because, at one time in the past, the whale won, and then won again.
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@ casteanddestiny
“Of course, Ishmael lives. We already know that. He’s around to tell the story. Right?”
Interestingly, according to the Wikipedia entry, the British first edition didn’t contain the epilogue, and it wasn’t obvious to the British reviewers that Ishmael survived. Quite a few of them remarked on the oddity of having the book narrated by a dead man. Possibly the reason we now find his survival predictable from the beginning of the book has to do with literary tradition over the last 170 years?
“Beyond that though, there is a reason why he lives and the rest of the crew doesn’t. All of the rest of them are all-in.”
As a general analysis, this is a very good point. I think it has merit as one way to interpret the ending, and I don’t mean the following remarks as a rejection of your theory, but more as adding some thoughts on how my take was different.
Unlike Abagond, my heart didn’t break for Ahab; I felt that he brought about his own destruction. What I found shattering about the end is how Ahab dragged the rest of the crew down with him.
I think it could be argued that not every crew member was all-in besides Ishmael: for instance, Fleece is just the cook and probably doesn’t consider himself any type of warrior against the whale.
And even among the ones who have made a career out of whaling, there are those who don’t agree with Ahab’s single-minded quest for revenge. Starbuck in particular tries to persuade him to give it up and take the ship safely home.
They all die needlessly because their captain goes after the wrong whale and cannot be dissuaded from it. That’s how I read it, anyway.
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@Solitaire I didn’t feel sorry for Ahab either. Remember, somewhere along the way, Ahab schmoozed with another captain who had suffered the same injury. The other captain was genial and accepted his injury as one of the hazards of the trade and no more than that.
I took a quick look at some of the online videos. There are a lot of takes on the character of Ahab. One called him “A Faustian archetype.”
Or maybe you could call him, as was Wolf Larsen by contemporary critic Jeanne Reesman, “a monster of Nietzschean individualism” conceived before there was a Nietzsche.
I have a master’s degree in English literature, which I just completed last year at the age of 73. In criticism, I’m not big on analyzing the pangs of personality in the characters. In Ahab, as in all significant characters, you have to look for something bigger, or at least that’s how I do it. My approach to criticism generally is structuralist and formalist, but my structuralism is the structuralism of social science, not literary structuralism. Social science was my background before I went into literature.
By the way, according to the Wikipedia article, the novel’s British publishers did a hack job on the text. More research would be needed to determine what was in Melville’s original text.
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