Moby-Dick or, the Whale

When I read it the first time I listened to it on audiobook and while I still have it 3 stars I found it rather boring. However on this reread I dedicated a lot of time to read it with a few cups of tea and read it slowly. The story became much more vividly and the characters became much more alive. I enjoyed my time with a lot and never really found it boring as I simply took a break and read something else if I found a feeling like that near. It might feel a bit daunting but dedicating some time to this book is totally worth it. 4.5 stars!

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Here’s the thing:

Moby-Dick isn’t really a novel. Harold Bloom described it as “a giant Shakespearean prose poem,” and while I’m not familiar enough with either Shakespeare or poetry to fully agree with his characterization, I certainly agree with his sentiment.

Moby-Dick isn’t driven by plot, or by character, but by metaphor and theme. It is a collection of contemplations on whales and the whaling industry interspersed with brief character sketches, with the overarching plot merely serving as the framing device. It was originally titled "The Whale" and absolutely should have kept that title, which is grandiose and unorthodox and more accurately reflects that the novel is much more about the whale

as a species and metaphor than it is a story about any whale

specifically (Moby-Dick).

And, if I’m being honest, I didn’t particularly like most of it.

I

loved the beginning, maybe the first 100 pages or so. Here Melville is at his most conventional. The story focuses on Ishmael as he seeks a contract on a whaling ship, and it’s gripping: atmospheric, gritty, occasionally hilarious, and layered with symbolism and metaphor.

But, shortly after boarding the

Pequod, the novel undergoes a distinct narrative and tonal shift. Ishmael fades into the background and more or less vanishes, and the novel becomes much less immediate and immersive. Melville begins to insert his famous essays on whales and whaling (which I initially enjoyed until my patience wore thin), sometimes pointing out the metaphor to the reader but often leaving it open to interpretation. When characters do appear, they are typically in short story-esque vignettes that often focus on events that are not especially gripping: for example, there’s a bafflingly long chapter in which Stubbs tells the cook how he likes his whale steak prepared and insists the cook preach a sermon to the nearby sharks. Occasionally the monotony is punctuated by a thrilling (and horrifying) whale chase, chapters which are brutal but also the most engaging. But mostly, Melville writes about the whiteness of the whale and the physiognomy of different species and how bad most whale paintings are etc. etc. in chapters that are laden with meaning and so so

so dull.

In terms of plot, not a lot

happens. The bookends of a story are there—a fantastic beginning and then a very,

very abrupt end—but the middle serves no real narrative purpose other than to recount the months in between the beginning and the end. It’s filled to bursting with metaphor and symbolism, but metaphor and symbolism do not a story make. The characters are similarly stagnant. I’m a bit baffled that

Moby-Dick is seen as a great character study, because I don’t find much complexity in the characters: they may be well-drawn, but they have no dimension, no movement. From beginning to end, they more or less remain the same (with the exception of

the fact that all but Ishmael die

).

Stylistically,

Moby-Dick is completely unlike anything else I’ve ever read. It feels nothing like a Victorian novel and more like a precursor to modern literary fiction. The prose is just beautiful (Melville loves alliteration.) Ishmael often speaks directly to the reader in second person (later in the book, as well), which is fascinating. In fact, while Ishmael is ostensibly our first-person narrator throughout, we begin to see scenes in which he is clearly not present, overhearing conversations and muttered asides he could not have heard. Several chapters are formatted as a play. The chapters are not long, and some are

very short, only a paragraph. One gets the sense that Melville wanted to explore and challenge the form of the novel as much as anything else; when classifying whales, he uses book sizes as his reference (what this means I can’t tell you).

As to what the book is

about…who can say. It’s certainly nothing very uplifting. It’s nihilistic and anti-religious and fatalistic brutal, altogether a bit of a soul-crushing read.

There’s no doubt that

Moby-Dick is experimental and audacious in both content and form. Melville does things with prose and theme that I’ve never read in any other author. He set out to write a masterpiece and stuffed his story with all the requisite metaphor and subtext that turns a book purportedly about whaling into a novel that examines…a lot of other things. So what to do with a novel that is undeniably brilliant and (for long stretches) undeniably boring? I wish I could say I loved it, but 3 stars is all I can give.

Some favorite passages:

Call me Ishmael. 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.

What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, halfattained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperboreane1 winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.

In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant—the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.

There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.

For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.

[…] declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time);

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

[…] they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

[…] 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.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.

And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.

As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”

But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. […] these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection; be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence;

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing […]

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antechronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible.

[…] the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.

And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, halfway meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.

The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God’s throne.

A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

I didn't expect that I would like this book so much. I heard many things about it. Many people did not like it. And to tell you the truth, after Don Quixote fiasco, I didn't have much hope. And here, such a surprise!

I think it was mostly the beginning, which I find excellent. I didn't expect this book to be so much funny. But the first one-third of this story is full of really humorous moments. To start with the whole story of Ishmael's friendship with Queequeg. I honestly laughed at these events. And I consider this part of the book to be the best. It is a pity that the rest of the story did not keep this humorous tone.

But I can also understand why so many people did not like this book. Much of it is very erudite and contains very long and detailed scientific descriptions of whales. Their natural classification, extremely precise anatomical structure, distinction between individual species, whale habits, products made out of different parts of their bodies. And finally, whales in culture and art. These parts, and there are a lot of them, can be very boring for the reader. I listened to this book as an audiobook, and maybe that's why these fragments were not as boring to me as if I had read them in a book.

Besides these scientific descriptions of whales, there are only the events on the ship, Pequod, which is de facto fishing for whales. Contrary to appearances, not much is happening here and many people can be bored with this part. Again, I had no problems with it.

Perhaps because of the bizarre form of this book. Which at times looks as if inspired by Shakespeare's works. Introducing characters and dialogues in a way we know from dramatic works. Funny situations are intertwined with scientific explanations of whales and the hardships of life on a whaling ship. And finally, which I did not expect at all, with fragments of very philosophical reflections on the world and human life. The behavior and building of whales are very interestingly transferred to human life and the construction of the world, giving the impression that the whole story is really about something completely different than just whaling.

Another thing I did not expect is a kind of respect for the whales that you see on the pages of this book. Of course, whaling is cruel and has almost led to the extinction of these animals. And there is nothing romantic about it. But despite that, Melville somehow managed to give dignity to whales, show their great significance. And there is no doubt that Melville, or at least his main hero and narrator of this story - Ishmael, feels great respect for these huge animals. In all the pursuit of whales there is some respect for nature and its cruel laws. The book also shows how difficult, dirty and ungrateful this work was.

I am very happy that I read this book, I wish I had done it earlier. If only you can handle the cruelty to animals in your books, I strongly recommend you this story.

There are much better places to go for whale facts.