1. “Melville inserted chapters on whales and whaling because there was no Google or Wikipedia. Most people couldn’t find out about these topics, so he chose to write a book that informed and educated.
The 1840s and 50s were a very literate time, and many books on natural history, accounts of whaling voyages, tracts on nautical affairs, etc. were available in bookstores. Melville purchased many of them to use as research sources for his writing. Suffice to say that someone in 1852 who wanted to learn about whales would not be likely to buy Moby-Dick, poorly reviewed as it was.
2. Melville was far ahead of his time, writing a modernist book decades before it would become a thing.
Practically true, but incomplete. Melville chose such a radical structure because older novels like Tristram Shandy and Sartor Resartus had taught him how weird books could be – I only read 40 pages of Shandy, but would confidently say that it is many times more strangely structured than Moby-Dick.
by PM_BRAIN_WORMS