For some reason, I assumed I had read been tormented with this book in high school like a lot of posters here have described. Last week, I realized “Hey, I don’t think I’ve ever read it. I’ve only seen the movies.”
So I’m reading it right now on the Gutenberg website. At the moment, I’m about a third of the way through. Here are some comments:
Wow, it reads like a much more modern novel than it is. It was written in 1851, I think? And he’s frequently playing with the language more like a good, memorable poet than a novelist. There are some good phrases in there I have to go back and read again.
There’s also an awful lot of sermonizing and philosophizing claptrap to wade through. I would have hated this at age 16; I’m glad I didn’t try to read it back then.
More later as I read on.
ETA: God, do I want some chowder after reading the Nantucket chapters.
One of the most interesting things about Melville was that he was writing post-Modern novels while the rest of the world was just starting to figure out Modernism.
My poor b.i.l. couldn’t get past the lengthy analysis in which Melville proves (!) that whales are fish, not mammals.
I’ve never read Moby Dick, but have read White Jacket and Omoo and enjoyed them. Hey, if I can get through a Michener novel, why not this?
(The really fun bit about White Jacket is that it helped lead the U.S. to abolish flogging as discipline in Navy ships. People read the book, were appalled, and wrote to Congress in large numbers. Congress acted. Sometimes, a book has real-world influence!)
Interesting…I’ve taken up the same effort; been reading it off my phone via Gutenberg for the past few months, along with other classics I never dove into. I’ve taken a leisurely pace, and tend to google a lot of references that go over my 20th century head. Also about a third of they way through, and I agree that I wouldn’t have appreciated it at 16 when my Dad urged me to read it. We read Billy Budd in HS English, and it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park.
Melville was already a famous and successful author when Moby Dick was published, but it was not well received at all. Almost universally panned in fact. Within a few decades though it was recognized as one of the greatest pieces of American literature. Cost of being ahead of your time I guess…
Abolition had much to do with this chap, Commodore Uriah P. Levy in 1850. Military flogging was abolished France Revolution, Prussia 1806, USA 1861?, Great Britain 1880. Of course, various countries substituted death or just as horrible field punishments* before and after for flogworthy offences. And the fact it was abolished in France didn’t mean that it wasn’t still used: I read of a couple of lancers whipped to skeletons for looting in 1812 — everybody was looting in 1812.
Naval flogging was abolished separately at different times.
However American naval discipline was the most severe, and applied in private shipping. It has been ascribed to Southern slave-owning influence.
**The merest sign of*hesitation in carrying out an order was enough to merit several stripes with a petty officer’s “colt” (whip). Petty offenses which found their way into the logbook – the wearing of dirty clothes, spitting on the deck or urinating out of a gunport – easily merited from six to a dozen lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Close punitive disciplinary control was also a feature of life aboard American merchant vessels.
Commander Samuel Francis Du Pont kept a journal of the floggings he awarded as captain of the Congress on a passage from Norfolk to Callao between 17 November and 28 March 1846. Du Pont was not known as an unduly strict commander. During the 131 days of the voyage, his notebook records 108 floggings; although this averages to somewhat less than one per day, in reality punishments were usually meted out every few days so that as many as half a dozen men were sometimes flogged. The offenses recorded included missing muster, fighting, “skulking,” lying, sleeping below deck on watch, being asleep on lookout, disobedience, disrespect, neglect of duty at quarters, and being dirty at muster.
What a nice man.
*Field Punishment N. 1, anybody ? And the Germans were fairly appalled at the severe British execution of deserters in WWI.
I read Moby Dick back in high school. In fact, I read it three times. I loved it. I admit that the book has problems (non spoilers- some passages read like a script with stage directions, Ishmael has knowledge of some events and conversations he wasn’t present for and was never told about). But I call it a masterpiece.
I’ve been reading classics electronically or on audiobook as well. A lot of them have sermonizing sections. I was shocked to read Robinson Crusoe again and see how much religious discourse it includes. I think when we’re younger, we blip right over the philosophizing, especially if the book is required reading.
Moby-Dick is in my Audible queue, waiting for a road trip.
Heh, I like the little dashes of humor to lighten up the tension and paranoia. After his first boat-chase of a whale, that ends in getting lost in a squall and then run down by the main ship, Ishmael asks:
“Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?”
When Flask says “Well, duh, yeah”, Ishmael observes that he may as well then go below and start a rough draft of his will.
What do you call it when one uses a string of words most of which start with the same letter? Melville employs this a lot. Like this:
“. . .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.”
There’s a paragraph describing Ishmael and Queequeg weaving a mat. Ishmael is operating the warp and the woof, and Queequeg is tamping down each row. Ishmael is in a dreamy trance and likens the warp (the up and down threads) to Necessity; the shuttle going back and forth with the woof through Necessity is his own direction in Life; and Queequeg’s slapdash tamping-down as Chance. Thus goes his life history.
My theory about Moby Dick is that the plot is an allegory for the White Whale. We see it early in the story, but then it dives beneath the waves, and we spend the next half of the book waiting for it to resurface, catching tantalizing glimpses once in a verrrrrrrrry long while, just enough to convince us the plot still lives, before it disappears for eight more chapters.
I tried. My god, I tried. But I am no Ahab. When I reached the chapter about the color white, I gave up.
I’ve never read the novel itself but there is a superb episode of the TLC series Great Books narrated by Donald Sutherland which give a very in-depth & detailed examination of it.
I rather enjoyed the book.
Someone also gave me the hint to read it like it was some guy’s blog. It really works that way. Sometimes the blogger tells you about his day, sometimes he gets lost in his own thoughts about the biology of whales - but he’s a pretty good writer, so you keep reading it.
Me too. For a random mix of reasons, for about the past 25 years it has been a rule of mine to reread Moby Dick every time I move house. But I’ve lived in the same apartment for the last seven years so I haven’t cracked it open since I moved in. I miss it.
And I like the philosophizing sections, especially seeing how differently I react to their mishmash of information as I find out new things about some of the details over the years. The narrative and dramatic portions get pretty much the same reactions from me as they did at first (and I still like them), but the musings/lecturings seem to show a new facet every time.
What a snapshot of the marine naturalism of its day, too! I remember the part where the narrator insists that the whales aren’t being overfished, they’ve just found sneakier hiding-places somewhere… a bit of tragic foreshadowing that I think Melville didn’t intend!
I’m at the places where whale-killing and flensing is detailed. A whole chapter is devoted to the type of rope used to attach the whaling boat to the harpoon! The best I could make out, Melville said that the tub containing the coiled rope was at the back of boat, and the line from it was strung out across the wrists and oar handles of the rowers! I thought I misunderstood that.
Then I went on to youtube to look up this scene from the old 1956 movie, and that precarious scenario is indeed depicted in the film. When the whale is harpooned, the rope is thereafter dragged across everybody and their oars? That seems a stupid way of doing things, but what do I know.
I always wondered if the whalers didn’t eat some whale meat as well as boiling down the blubber, and now I know: yes, they did. BTW, what was up with that chapter of Stubb the mate hassling and baiting the old cook about whale steaks and sharks? What an asshole.
