A masterpiece of storytelling and symbolic realism, this thrilling adventure and epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. More than just the tale of a hair-raising voyage, Melville's riveting story passionately probes man's soul. A literary classic first published in 1851, Moby-Dick represents the ultimate human struggle.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The frustration, the grandeur,
By C. Ackerman (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)
If it were possible to simultaneously give a book one star and five stars, this book would deserve it. It's easy to see how people could hate it, and any teacher who assigns it is either brilliant or as mad as Captain Ahab. Being forced to read this could only be punishment. A friend of mine who had to read it years ago said it read like a whaling encyclopedia with a short story injected into it. This is pretty accurate. Indeed, the overwhelming amount of whaling data broke Melville's streak of commercially successful novels and his popularity never recovered in his lifetime.
For the first eighty or so pages, Moby Dick comes across as probably the queerest of nineteenth-century American novels, but then suddenly there is a chapter outlining all known whales and their physical characteristics. This is followed by chapters discussing things like the awfulness of Moby Dick's whiteness, which includes an exhausting list of every symbolic connotation for the color white that Melville can remember. And it doesn't stop. Ninety pages towards the end, when the Pequod finally encounters a ship that has recently spotted Moby Dick, you'd expect the next chapter to describe the crew racing to Ahab's nemesis. But no! There is a discussion of the skeleton of whales, including physical measurements and the location of known skeletons (like the whale museum in Hull, England). Not kidding. And then towards the end the dialogue starts sounding like Shakespeare and becomes extremely difficult to understand. I guess this was an attempt to convey a sense of tragedy, but it violates the realism the work had up to that point. In short, historians of nineteenth-century sailing might wet themselves over all the detail about onboard life, but it's easy to imagine a coerced student crying in mind-numbed frustration instead. And if more people could get through it, there would be a lot more one-stars. But they give up and don't write reviews. Okay, so that's why someone might hate this novel. But let's say you've read the sea stories of Joseph Conrad or Patrick O'Brian or simply have an overactive imagination and some patience. This doesn't feel like a novel as much as a relentless succession of brilliant images. Like the shark frenzy around the whale carcass tied to the ship or the little hole in the deck where Ahab secures his peg leg or the deck tilting at such an acute angle as the weight of the whale pulls down one side of the ship, or Moby Dick coming up out of the deep, starting with this little white blur. Melville seems perfectly aware of how powerful these images are when he abandons all pretense of plot and writes experimental chapters that read a lot---a lot---like mood-establishing excerpts from modern screenplays. My favorite part is a chapter called rather innocently 'The line'. It describes in painstaking detail where all the rope is stored in the little boats used to attack the whales. Then it describes how that line unfurls once a harpooned whale tries to flee. The rope goes flying off so fast---smoke comes off of it---that the crew momentarily feels like it is trapped inside a steam engine. My description is clumsy, but the chapter is brilliant. But it's hard to process all the brilliance because the chapter is where it mentions in passing that these attack boats are made out of wood a half inch thick---the same thickness as my bookcases---and they're going after the largest toothed predators on the planet. I would have to say that it's the only novel I've read that's so vivid that I could `hear' a soundtrack to it. And the feeling you get that Moby Dick didn't only get Ahab's leg but also accidentally swallowed a whaling version of Wikipedia? Personally, I felt that the long descriptions of sea life helped with the pacing, that they gave the sense of the passage of time, of giving the Pequod the opportunity of crossing half the globe. I'm pretty sure everyone who might read this novel knows the ending, but I was still floored by it when I read it. Knowing what happens doesn't protect you against the suspense. Once I was done with it, I felt battered and bruised myself, torn between a sense of "That was amazing" and "Please don't ever ask me to read another line of Melville again in my life." But it's been over a week since I finished it and its images linger. I've started to accept that sooner or later, I will read it again. So this is a high risk book, provoking strong reactions. But Thrift Dover edition is all but giving the book away, so it's not an expensive risk. (The font size could afford to be slightly bigger, but it's not a huge issue.)
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I feel this is an enjoyable read,,
By
This review is from: Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)
Simply put, it takes good general knowledge/education to appreciate all the symbolism, imagery, and metaphor in this book (and even then you still will probably miss something that's been written). I won't get into all that because it's been beaten to death elsewhere. The other thing to remember is that Herman Melville himself served aboard a whaler. Maybe that's why he found it necessary to write about every last detail about life aboard a 19th century whaler. Otherwise yes, if you just are hungry for the story you probably could get away with reading the first and last hundred pages. That being said I found this a very enjoyable read. The chapters like some other reviews have mentioned are for the most part brief and go fast. And I think you will enjoy even the rather dry parts if you are a history buff like myself. Maybe like myself this book should be read at a distance from your formal education, that way your life experience/knowledge I feel will help in its enjoyment and interpretation, and you can come to your own conclusions about how much is really going on here, without the fear of getting a bad grade!
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disjointed,
By
This review is from: Moby-Dick (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)
There are a lot of fascinating things in this book: reflections on the nature of civilization, religion, obsession. A lot of it is surprisingly nuanced for a mid nineteenth century account, and delivers a story with a lot more ambiguity than I was expected. Unfrotunately, none of those are the central focus of the book, the essence of the authorial intent. That main intent is focused on providing an array of facts on whales and whaling. This element really grinds down the conventional story, both in the sheer length given the minutia of detail and the stalling of momentum the back and forth goes.
It's interesting to read this work in the light of hard science fiction, which similarly often carries huge amounts of exposition and background setting. I'm not sure if I can hold this piece as objectively more flawed because it's talking about details I'm not interested in, but at the end of the day I'm not terribly interested in whales, and feel the author went too far into his own specific interests in representation. That gives the book a strange kind of meta element to the Ahab obsession for which it is best known. Still, I can't dismiss it entirely, and am at a level curious to see how similar Melville's other stuff is. I can believe from the strength of concept in visualizing many of the characters and the dramatic build that there's a great novel in him, but in the end this text is too padded, slow and disjointed to be a success.
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