Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

I will not purport to write a review of Herman Melville’s book, Moby Dick or The Whale.  For me to do so would be pretentious beyond measure.  What I am attempting to do is proselytize for the book.  For some reason I missed reading this American classic until now.  Truth is I probably would not have appreciated the book when I was younger.

I do have a confession to make though.  I did not read the book, but listened to the audio-book which was a several day affair.  I spend so much time driving and at times my job is rote, I have found audio-books a wonderful way to fill the time.

What I knew of the book was the story of the obsessed Ahab and his hunt for the malevolent white whale, Moby Dick.  To me the book was a documentary with the story of Ahab’s hunt a vehicle for driving the narration forward and keeping the reader engaged.  Don’t misunderstand me, Ahab’s story is wonderful and there is much to be learned therein, but it is only part of the book.

The book is in large part a documentary on the Nantucket whaling industry of the 1800s, The  Deadliest Catch of its day.   It is also the natural history of the cetaceans as was known in 1850.  There is chilling passage in the book about the impossibility of over hunting the whales as the bounty of the sea knew no end.  There are wonderful character portraits in the book.  There is, also, much detailing of the social norms and manners of the day, especially in this distinct stratum of society.

The book is on the surface prose.  To my ear, with its stylized language, it read as poetry.  Having read a bit about Melville this makes sense.  His last big, unsuccessful project was an epic poem of epic length.  The poetic nature of the prose just added to my enjoyment.

There were a few surprising themes in the book.  The first was his questioning of religion, and the very existence of God.  Even though Thomas Paine had preceded him, I do not think this a position that would have endeared him to the readers of the day.  In fact, the book was more or less a flop when first published.  Another theme that surprised the heck out of me was the homoerotic nature of some of the passages.  I had to read a quick biography of Melville in an effort to find his sexual orientation.  He was heterosexual, but frequently explored themes that pushed gender, philosophical and religious boundaries.  I was relieved to find that I was not the first to find passages of this nature.  The first is in the beginning of the book where Ishmael is forced to share a bed with Queequeg.  The second and more erotic passage is later in the book when the crew of the Pequod are processing a whale and working with the blubber.  I did not see it mentioned elsewhere, but I found Ahab’s relationship with Pip later in the book as suspect.  As a man who had spent 37 of his 40 working years at sea, one wonders about how his biological urges were met.  As Ahab goes out to meet the whale, Pip’s dialogue sounds like that of a man lamenting separation from his lover.

You need to remember the times in which the book was written.  Parts of it are strongly bigoted.  There is a sense of American Exceptionalism though out the book.  Man’s dominion over all things on land and sea are a given, even though at times Melville does seem to question that.

It is a long book, either read or audio, but it is well worth your time.  There is a reason it was the first piece of literature placed in the Library of America.  Go back to your school days and revisit a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing.

Here is link on LibriVox.org for the audio-book download of Moby Dick.  The content on LibriVox is free for the most part.  Since the readers are volunteers the quality of some of the offerings is suspect.  However, the reader for Moby Dick was wonderful.  And they had just one for the whole book.  Sometimes they have different readers for separate portions of a book, I find that a little off-putting.