Book Review (Rucksack): Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Written by Herman Melville in 1851

The Raccoon: Melville’s Great American Novel recounts a sailor’s journey aboard a whaleship under the command of the monomaniac Captain Ahab.  Ahab’s crew finds themselves trapped within their commander’s determination to hunt down the whale that severed his leg, at any cost.

UNMASKED: I have yet to meet a single other person who has read Moby-Dick from cover to cover.  While I take pride in finishing the daunting, arduous task of reading this novel, I only wish I had taken a moment to realize why nobody else has bothered with the struggle.  Melville truly made a mountain out of a molehill.

At the heart of Moby-Dick lies an impactful story about the dangers of untempered passion and not processing one’s emotions.  However, similar to how a single ship becomes insignificant when placed into an ocean, the plot is buried under fathoms of opinionated history lessons and undesired anatomy lectures.

While I would applaud Melville for using strenuous passages which study the minutiae of whales and the process/tools/reflection of hunting them to create the illusion that the reader is present on the many-month whaling voyage, the author instead seems to drag the reader through every whaling voyage that has ever taken place over the course of centuries.  I may now possess a uniquely specific knowledge of the composition of a whale’s skin and the chronology of a spare lance (although such chapters are so influenced by the narrator’s personal, only partially educated views ((Ishmael himself asserts that he is no expert, yet immediately after expects the reader to trust his entire taxonomy of marine mammals)) that I am left wondering about the degree of their scientific accuracy), but such comprehension adds very little to the story and absolutely nothing to the remainder of my life.

Moby-Dick the novel parallels Moby Dick the aggressive whale, in that one must wrestle with it for months in hopes of mastering it.  I am exhausted; although I do not regret reading the Great American Novel, I only wish my suffering yielded a greater payoff.

Strengths:

• Three beautiful, profound passages almost make the entire novel worth reading.
• Melville brilliantly captured both Ahab’s obsessive nature and his officers’ conflicting fear and respect for him.

Weaknesses:

• Each chapter of narrative is separated by at least one tangential chapter elaborating on a (typically minor) detail of the previous section.
• The ending is brutally unsatisfying.

Still Trying to Decide:

• One chapter unexpectedly disregards prose style and is literally written as a musical.  Another chapter is entirely dedicated to analyzing the morality and psychology of the color white.

Rating: 10/20 cannibals

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you are worried that you are acting selfishly.  At least you are not leading several dozen men away from economic prosperity to their death at the hands of a dangerous beast that you may not even find.