Ok so I finished Moby Dick today. I never had much interest in reading it until reading some posts/comments about it last year on Reddit.
It took me about a month and a half to read. I also went a week or two without picking it up. I was losing steam around chapter 80 or so, but didn’t want to let too much time pass, so I had to force myself to get back into it.
I have mixed feelings about it. I’m still processing everything. I wonder if Ishmael is a reliable narrator? I find it interesting that he is able to tell us about conversations he wasn’t present for, and just so happens to be the only survivor of the Pequod. Also thinking back to when he is relaying the story to the Spaniards and they are so engrossed in listening and on the edge of their seats. Is Ishmael just good at building suspense? Does he exaggerate?
Also I got the impression that on the beginning of the book he didn’t know much about whaling or what it’s like to go on a whaling voyage but just felt like it was his “calling” then suddenly he is a whale and whaling expert.
It was entertaining enough. I actually enjoyed all the explanations of the ship and whale parts and the whale hunting. It made the last 3 chapters which are so action packed easier to envision. I loved the beginning chapters at the inn with Queequeg. The ending when the Parsee is pulled up from underwater dead and stares at Ahab. Ugh I audibly gasped and it gave me chills. I could envision the terror.
I had to spend a lot of time looking up definitions and even looked up some of the paintings he was referencing so I could get a better idea. I would get lost in some of the language and not in a good way. And as I mentioned, I really had to
Force myself to push through. I might reread it again in the future.
by Under_Obligation
2 Comments
Moby Dick is an excellent novella. Too bad it’s a novel.
But I agree with what you say about Ishmael! He’s a great storyteller which makes him a great narrator. That’s what makes him fascinating because in his story telling he humanizes the whale that then makes him hate it, it’s his rival.
I love Moby Dick. I’ve read it 3 times in full, and once in a select abridged version, I consider the opening chapter to be the best in all of literature, and modelled one of my own novels on it.
However. Whilst the encyclopaedic whaling chapters are integral to the novel as a whole, I firmly believe that there are at least 30% too many of them, and clustered too close to the end of the novel.
The best encyclopaedic chapters are nearer the start, and occur when the reader is most fresh. However, past the halfway mark, many of them are trite or even outright stupid. Some way warrant a tongue-in-cheek approach – a self-delusional notion that “whales couldnt possibly be hunted to extinction” – but just as the novel should buily momentum to the ending, it remains bogged down in minutae.