There’s a YA novel called White as the Waves, but I don’t know if it’s any good.
You skipped the 187 pages of
*Mmmmmm, I’m hungry.
Oooh, krill! I loves eating krill!
Not hungry now. Happy happy.
Swim. Swim swim swim. Swim swim swim swim swim.
Sleepy. Time to take a nap.
Oooh, hungry. Are there any krill around here?*
Moby Dick’s a sperm whale. No krill for that mofo!
*Hungry…
Diiiive!
Oooh! Squid!
Aaah! Suction cups!
CHOMP
Mmmmm… squid… droooool
Why need the whale stand for anything? It’s been a long time since I’ve read Melville, but I have a great problem with simplistic interpretations such as object-A-equals-concept-B in literature. Symbols are rarely, if ever, that cut-and-dry, except in allegorical works. Why can’t the “greater power that limits man” be simply nature itself? That makes more sense to me than the whale representing God.
The Whale stands for Nature, and its indifference to man. I haven’t read or talked about the book in a while, but basically Ahab is trying to assert control over an uncarring universe, and the Whale could give f-all about Ahab. There’s one bit in the book I particularly liked, where Ahab is talking, and says:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard mask. But in each event - in the living act , the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by trusting through the wall?
(yoinked from online, not an actual copy of the book, so I apologize if there were any errors in that)
So, defeating the Whale is analogous to breaking through the unreasoning mask to see what lies beyond. Ahab is looking for reason in an unreasoned world. Perhaps God lies beyond the pasteboard mask, but Moby Dick is the mask, not the face behind the mask.
I can’t remember the details, but the era in which Melville was writing was full of folks writing about man and Nature, and its cold indifference to us.
This what I need more of: sperm whales eat no krill? I’ve got to find out more about the life of sperm whale before I even start writing. Anyone have a good place to begin reading up on spermies?
Bosda: I have no idea what Melville wanted to symbolize. Maybe God. maybe nature. Maybe Evil. Maybe the mysteries of the universe. My point was that once you start attaching simple explanations of complex and difficult symbols, you jump to conclusions that are easily off-base. For example, if Moby Dick = God, then is Melville sayig that God is all wet? If Mody Dick = God, is Melville saying that God has a six-foot-long penis? Symbols, IMO, should elaborate on the thing they’re symbolizing, not reduce them to simple equivalents. MD= God is a good place to begin a discussion, not to end one.
Me and Eonwe pontificating on the possibility that Mody Dick stands for nature a minute apart. You got to believe Someone is controlling our every action, doncha?
Maybe it’s Herman Melville.
Here’s a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale
Basically a sperm whale is a toothed whale, which can’t eat krill because they don’t have baleen (those whiskery things that, for instance, humpback whales have in their mouths).
Sperm whales eat giant squid, rays and octopi.
What kind of rays? 1920’s style death rays?
Nah, Herman’s dead.
Maybe it’s Moby! No, not the whale. The creepy bald white guy who sings, kind of.
And a sperm whale is a member of the suborder Odontoceti, the toothed whales. Sperm whales are the largest members, since most of the Odontoceti are dolphins, porpoises and small whales like narwhals and belugas.
The baleen whales belong to the suborder Mysticeti. This is where most of the big guys are, including the blue and fin whales (the largest extant creatures on earth). These are the guys who eat krill.
Did he have a six foot penis?
Only once. In 1960. For 20 minutes.
Might I suggest Fluke by Christopher Moore for a Whale point of view. 
I’m working on a treatment that cycles back on itself, leaving Ishmael depressed after the he disembarks the Rachel in Manhatten.
I’m calling it Mobius.