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Rating:  - a challenge to read and understand; requires some pondering...
hard book but all the more rewarding. the narration in itself is part of the melvilles point. moby dick reads as a organized history and methodology of the whaling industry and is often times drawn out and dull. but this narrations illustrates the point of mans obsession of understanding the universe. ishmael is by no means a definite resource on whaling as is shown by his constant interjections of myth and exaggeration. ishmaels narrations goes on to illustrate man's nature to intertwine emotion with reality, thus proving the futility of understanding the world.
the obsessive pursuit of something larger than what men can understand in their finite knowledge is accumulated as the arrogance of ahab. ahab shows us that we are emotional beings who cast aside all rationality for ones personal gratification. it is an allegory of mans futile pursuit of understanding and commanding the world, ultimately, ahab shows us that man cannot escape his arrogance/ignorance. Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
Rating:  - Get back to the Pequad please!
My title might imply that I didn't enjoy this... certainly Moby Dick is a daunting book to pick up, and it's very easy to catch your eyes skimming rather than reading... but I would have to say, once read, it is easy to figure out why this book is a classic.
Sure it took me a while to get past my knowledge of whales, the fact that they aren't fish and that they are intelligent animals. And having been out of school for several years now, it took a bit to knock the cobwebs out of the brain to read the writing style of the time. But in reality this is a fantastic story on so many levels. The meaning and the subtext are brilliant. For those of you who have spent your life under a rock...
Moby Dick is the tale of Ishmael, a teacher turned whaler who joins the ship the Pequod to sail in search of whales for the oils, blubber and meat they contain. If you are not sure how whaling works, don't worry - Ishmael is going to give you an entire tutorial on the topic. You will also learn the history of the whale, and all about it's anatomy... or what they perceived these things to be at the time the book was written. So Ishmael sets sail to learn that his new captain - Ahab, is a little bit on the OCD side... you see he's recently lost a leg to this huge white sperm whale the sailors call "Moby Dick." And well, Ahab took this as a personal slight so he's out to capture and kill Moby Dick.
Because this is a review and not a term paper I am not going to go into the deeper meaning of everything, instead I'll just say that yes, this is a daunting book to pick up, but it is also a wonderful read.
So why not 5 stars? Well mainly from personal taste... I liked the story of Ahab, the ship, and the hunt... but Ishmael won't stay on topic and keeps going on and on about the size of a whale's jaw or how the Kracken was actually a whale, or that St. George actually killed a whale and called it a dragon. I found myself wanting to shake Ishmael and tell him "Enough of this, get back to the STORY!" But as I said... this was just personal taste, egged on by the fact that I REALLY liked the story part of the book. Now I had read the childrens version of this back in the 3rd grade, and it was my favorite classic for years. I had always dreaded reading the full version, but in reality it didn't take me more than a week, and I wasn't trying all that hard. I would highly recommend that any avid reader at least give this a try. It is truly a classic for a reason.
Rating: - Bloody Battle in Affghanistan! Grand contested election for the Presidency of the United States!
Who would have thought that Melville wrote for the present day? That he could predict the simultaneous events as he did with these two headlines in chapter 1? (don't hold the 2 fs in Afghanistan against me, this is a quote!).
Another indicator of contemporarity: Melville invented product placement! The Chief Mate of the Pequod is called Starbuck!
Ishmael, the narrator and bosom pal of great cannibalistic pagan hero Queequeg, is tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. Meditation and water are wedded forever. In this world, headwinds are far more prevalent than winds from astern. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian! To do anything coolly is to do it genteelly. The world is a ship on its passage out. All thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved; this is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters.
Pious harponeers never make good voyagers - it takes the shark out of them. A soul is a sort of fifth wheel to a waggon. What's to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. An utterly feerless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Sparkling aphoristic thinking about the world as such, dominated by a kind of multicultural tolerant religiosity.
Let me finish my enthusiastic quotes with the following superb instruction from the ship owner on the departure of the Pequod:
Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts.
Of course the Nantucketers are not only Quakers, they are also sea hermits. They have discovered about everything that can be discovered on the oceans.
Frankly, if you are bored by the Whale, you are a hopeless case and no explaining in the world will solve that problem. So I won't try, but sit back and have fun. Last time I did that was quite precisely 30 years ago. At the same time I stopped smoking, which is of course a pure coincidence, but it got stuck in my memory. Moby Dick, that was when I stopped smoking. In the book, they smoke a lot, and it has important social meaning. Something to share. (And just in case you thought I brought up my own smoke-stopping without good reason and with no connection to the book: Ahab stops smoking in chapter 30!)
I wish, Ishmael and Queequeg were less of the teetotallers that they are and would have a good single malt once in a while, just for social reasons.
One complaint against Mr.Melville: he transforms Germany's greatest painter in history, Albrecht Duerer, into 'Dutch Albert Durer'. That's hard to forgive, unless in M's time Dutch and German were synonyms. (He also called Hamburg a Dutch city in Redburn!)
Rating: - Hey! You Can't Be Ishmael Again! It's My Turn to Be Ishmael!
Yes, friends, that's how it always went when my cousins and I played Moby Dick on the old farm. There were enough of us to make up a decent cast only on holidays, and there were always a couple of girl cousins who thought they should get to play with us, but since I was the oldest, we did it my way. Being the biggest also, it would have been natural for me to play the White Whale, but I was sensitive about my height and always stuck my humorless cousin Lennart with that voiceless role. And since I was the game narrator, it really WAS my job to be Ishmael, but my closest-in-age cousin Paul was jealous and likely to run to Mormor to complain that I was being bossy. So we rotated the role of Ishmael, on the condition that if anyone lost his place in the unfolding of the adventure, he'd be instantly demoted to playing Stubb or Flask, and I'd assume my destiny as the observed observer, the author of events.
Ishmael is the main character in the novel, you know, the one who sets the pace and calls the tune. It's Ishmael who goes questing; Ahab's quest is just a bright projection of Ishmael's, a particularly fantastic shadow puppet on the wall of Ishmael's cave. It's mostly Ishmael to tells us what Ahab is all about, though betimes Melville lets Ahab rage in his own plenipotent Shakespearean dialect. It's Ishmael who leads us, in the reverse of Dante, to paradisal seas and proper Christian faith first, then to the purgatory of the butchery, and then the depths of hellish annihilation. If I ever had to teach a high school English class - an honor I don't aspire to - I'd tell the little blighters straight off that in any novel with a first-person narrator, that's the chap to watch. Finally, it's Ishmael who LEARNS. In his first encounter with Queequeg, he learns human relativity. Through all the pages and chapters detailing the nature of the whale and of whaling, he learns and learns, and shares his learning in his ever-bemused, ironic style. Of course, he learns eventually that HE is the sole survivor of his own quest. And don't be fooled for a moment that he hasn't learned the metaphysical truth that he set out to learn in the symbolic guise of the White Whale...
Moby Dick is a book about the dread Melville felt at his increasing religious uncertainty, his fear of the infinite, and particularly of an infinite that might well be empty, that might be as void as the color white. He says as much in the key chapter 42, 'The Whiteness of the Whale': "...a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink..."
But Moby Dick is also a rollickingly funny book, ripping anything it touches with its sarcasm and satire. If one chapter seems wordy, dear reader, keep your eyes open and you'll be rewarded by a side-splitter in a few pages. Melville perhaps still wrote under the illusion that he could sell profundity to the parlor readership of Victorian America; a good thing for us, since he gave us full measure of adventure, of humor, and of personal anguish all in one unforgettable book. What each reader notices as she/he reads Moby Dick will be as different as what each hiker sees while descending into the Grand Canyon. I've read it three times now, decades apart; this time, with my own metaphysical quests all logged, I found it more hilarious, more picturesque, more a grand display of virtuosic wordsmithing than I recalled. Anyone who finds Moby Dick boring isn't worth his/her hard tack biscuit.
Rating: - Hard to ignore and not wonder about the meaning of Ishmael's ambiguous sexuality
This book has many interesting well-known aspects (e.g., it's indeed long and often boring, or at least prone to digression; but it is also a great American myth that gets better and better as it goes along and peaks in the bravura last 30 pages; and it is heavily and positively inspired by Shakespeare's best work.) Most of these facets are covered in other reviews that you'll read at Amazon and other places. But one aspect that is not really touched on in much detail by other reviewers is how very GAY it is.
I assumed before reading it, that there might be some homoerotic overtones to a book about men who spend a year together out at sea. But what I didn't expect was how much the mythological aspect of this odyssey is tied to the philosophy that men are most fulfilled and find greatest meaning sharing their lives, bodies, and souls exclusively with other men. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But as a heterosexual, I was stuck by how much of the art and psychology of the book seemed to be cryptically but persistently gay-oriented.
By the end of the book, after reading about Ishmael sleeping with and then ritually marrying a fellow whaler (admittedly without any sex explicitly mentioned), and chatting excitedly in the same bed together all night with him; and later seeing how much Ishmael notices and comments on other men's bodies; and culminating in a later chapter that describes Ishmael's near-ecstasy while running his fingers through the Whales 'sperm' while touching the fingers of other whalers doing the same with Ishmael gazing into their eyes, it made me wonder what Melville might have been trying to imply.
When I finished and closed the book I thought that the artful and fantastic philosophizing of Melville, along with the originality with which he picks up the style and substance of Shakespeare's soliloquies to make his own points, mixed beautifully with the building adventure story to make a great statement about human beings' tragic universal struggle against fate and mortality. In the end this superseded and redeemed any distracting subtexts, and turned a rambling tour de force into a great work of art. But those subtexts are such a huge part of this book, that I cannot help but wonder if at its core -- at the emotional level -- the book is nearly as much about struggling with one's sexuality as it is about man's search for meaning in the highest sense.
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