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Moby-Dick Book Review

Moby-Dick is an 1851 novel by Herman Melville. It remains one of the quintessential American novels, though it is an imposing read today.

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“Call me Ishmael“

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When this famous book was published back in 1851 it wasn’t a success. In fact, it was only in the 1920s when it began to gain traction in literary circles and nowadays it’s considered a masterpiece by most critics. Although I respect it for many undeniably admiring qualities that it possesses as this staggeringly ambitious piece of storytelling, I still found it to be too difficult to read due to a couple of reasons.

A story about a captain’s doomed quest to kill a whale that once maimed him, it is a tale that is very much at its core about the dangers of obsession and revenge. Being consumed by obsessive hatred is going to be your downfall in the end and that is the cautionary message behind this story. But it is also very much about the human beings’ foolish arrogance and superiority complex. We think that we know everything, but it is impossible to have full knowledge of anything in the world with the whales and the sea being the prime examples as depicted here.

Just because a biologist and/or naturalist researches whales for their entire lifetime doesn’t mean that they truly know what it means to be a whale on a deeper level. This was Melville’s main point that he made throughout this story and one that I personally found to be the deepest. There are also many foreshadowing symbols and events portrayed here that pinpoint to the idea of fate and the impossibility of evading one’s future. Class and race are also touched upon in a couple of significant chapters, but when it comes to an environmental message, the book came up short. The exploitative nature of whaling is depicted for sure, but it was nowhere near as criticized as I’d like it to have been.

The characterization is quite strong here, especially so when you realize that the majority of the novel contains very little dialogue, but is more concerned with ideas and themes than character arcs. But there is still a significant arc in the story and that is the story of Captain Ahab. A revenge-stricken, maniacal man, he would stop at nothing to kill this whale who tore his leg apart. Through him, Melville depicted greed, foolish arrogance and manic obsession that all spelled his eventual doom.

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He received the deepest arc, but the most character development was devoted to Ishmael, who is the narrator of the story. A narrator telling the tale of this captain, who can be considered a protagonist of the story was an interesting structure that really worked. Ishmael is the more passive and meditative man and his many meditations about the world, the ocean, the whales and even humanity itself were the most moving sections of this story.

The other characters all got very little to do, though Pip was a memorable black side character that hinted at horrendous racism going on back in the nineteenth century. But Queequeg as this Polynesian harpooner who becomes a great friend to Ishmael is the book’s heart and soul. A man who is seemingly dangerous, yet very calm and sweet, he was a continually intriguing presence.

The first couple of chapters built their “friendship” beautifully. It was fascinating realizing that Melville wrote about a gay romance in Moby-Dick. Yes, back in that era, men had closer, gentler friendships between one another, but the dynamic between these two is so warm, so intimate and full of definite homoeroticism that the end result is undoubtedly a relationship that is more romantic than friendly. The fact that we got here a mixed-race gay romance is incredible to me and something that isn’t talked about enough, but is most definitely there. How the novel ended was brilliant in and of itself, but the highlight was how Ishmael himself survived with the help of his diseased lover. It was all very poetic and moving.

Moby-Dick is an adventure novel only on the surface, but it is also a psychological drama, a tale of epic historical and nautical fiction as well as a romance and a tragedy in a way. It is difficult to exactly pinpoint its genre and its styles as they are all widely diverse. Melville here included so many monologues and soliloquies that were intriguing thematically speaking, but undeniably hindering the pace of the story.

Too often, the plot lost all momentum, especially in the more scientific passages. There is a significant portion of the book devoted to the biological explanations of whales that are now both dated and somewhat dull even to me as a biology enthusiast. At times it reached encyclopedic territories, which was odd for what was supposed to be an epic adventure tale. The intertextuality on display here was quite excessive and exhaustive. Melville’s writing also echoed the works of Shakespeare through those many monologues, but it made the novel difficult to read and understand, especially because he included so many allusions and references to previously published scientific papers and literary nautical works.

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It’s a work that has its amazing, iconic moments, but is overall a chore to sit through, especially in the second half, which proved to be too slow, dull and uneventful. He described so wonderfully the imagery, the whale itself (my theory is that Moby-Dick himself is just a symbol and not a real whale as he is described in such a mythological fashion) and the feeling of epic voyage is definitely achieved through its staggering length, but undoubtedly it’s not an engaging read at all.