Customer Reviews

White Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War

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This book is second only to Moby-Dick in the list of Melville's greatest works. And Melville's greatest works are America's greatest works.

White-Jacket has it all; humor, pathos, poetry and philosophy. This book makes me not only admire Melville the author but love Melville the man.

To suggest that the book would be better off without its "sermons" against cruelty in the Man-of-War's world is to suggest that Melville should have written some other book. He didn't write that book, he wrote this one and this is the one he wanted us to read. God bless him.

This is the second of three books Melville published in quick succession--after Redburn in 1849, and before Moby-Dick in 1851. If you read them in that order, you can actually witness Melville's powers as an author growing. White-Jacket has passages that approach the difficulty of Moby-Dick, but it also has not a few chapters that will have you rolling on the floor with laughter. It's not the best of Melville, but it is certainly brilliant! (Smokers, and non-smokers alike, should take a look at ch.91)

Fascinating, entertaining account of life on a man-of-war. Hilarious in parts; always subversive. Melville's mock glorification of the U.S. Navy and its officers is brilliant.

I read this book after reading Erving Goffman's "Asylums". In that book, Goffman, a sociologist, discusses the rise of "Total Institutions", i.e. institutions that totally control the lives of those within. Melville's "White Jacket" is a book that Goffman often referred to in order to illustrate different aspects of life within the total institution.

The introductory essay to this book discusses White Jacket in relationship to the growing bro-ha-ha over slavery, but I thought the book was much more interesting then that.

What was most suprising to me, having never read Melville before, was how funny some of the chapters were. Episodes involving Surgeon Cuticle amputating the leg of an unwilling seaman recall the funniest moments of television shows like Monty Python or the Simpsons.

Melville's accurate portrayal of life within the "T.I.", reminded me of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". There, the setting is an insane asylum, here it is a Man O' Wear, but both books deal with the tactics and strategies an individual might employ when faced with an oppressive living environment.

Although I am not sure when, or if, I might try to tackle author's masterpiece 'Moby Dick', I did come away from this book with a profound respect for Melville's capabilities as a writer. I will no longer take for granted his status among the pantheon of American writers.

The title, "White Jacket", serves as a double entendre by the author, Herman Melville. He actually sews up a hand-stitched jacket made from white sail cloth and other material, but it is ill-fitting, continually wet, ineffective against the cold, and actually the source of trouble between himself and the crew. So, the white jacket is a suit of his own making that very well brings about his own downfall. In the end, he discards it when he sees himself about to drown. And so, Melville uses this theme to serve as a metaphor for white superiority and the threatening danger of civil war over slavery.

Indeed, Melville experiences effective slavery during his voyage aboard the USS United States (USS Neversink in the book) during its run from the Pacific back to the Atlantic. And like so many black slaves, he and his crewmates suffer the ever-present threat of public lashings for even minor infractions. So, Melville also uses his book as an indictment against a hypocritical system, whereby officers are never wrong and never experience corporal punishment but the enlisted crew remain in perpetual danger of arousing the slightest displeasure of any officer with the ultimate result of a humiliating public lashing. However, no military organization could function effectively if it were a democratic institution; who would ever risk their life in such a case? (Even the early Communists quickly abandoned that principle.)

But the vast majority of the book focuses on the minute details of life aboard a frigate during the age of sail. Several hundred (500?) souls are packed into the space of a single wooden vessel for months on end. How the ship is organized and the rituals of life aboard ship are the mainstay of the book. Melville describes in factual detail the actual work (trimming sails, cleaning decks, etc.), the daily routines (meals on deck, standing watches, playing cards in secret, sleeping in the crew's quarters), the professions (sailor, waistman, quartermaster, boatswain, carpenter, surgeon, captain, commodore, purser, midshipmen, chaplain, pharmacist, cook, cockswain, gunner, and yeoman), the less usual events (floggings, making a port of call, receiving official dignitaries aboard ship, rounding Cape Horn, the order of Neptune initiation rites, rumors of war), and all the underlying social structure and tensions ever-present.

I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone interested in life aboard naval ships in the days of sail. With the rise of modern wireless communication, captains no longer enjoy such an absolute despotism as in times previous, but he still remains the unchallenged master aboard US navy vessels. While much of life aboard ship has changed, probably half of the book would still be quite familiar to modern-day sailors.

In this early title from the great Melville, we get an episodic account of the author's service aboard the USS United States, sister ship of "Old Ironsides." To avoid prosecution under the Articles of War, the name of the ship (called in the book the "Neversink") and his fellow crew members have been changed, but the stories retain their often startlingly candid detail. From the ritual floggings at the masthead to a critical grog shortage, Melville gives us a seaman's eye view of life of the 400-man crew of an American man-of-war marooned uncomfortably in a time of peace.

Each chapter is a commentary on some facet of life aboard the ship. Some are laden with irony and dry humor, others express thinly veiled outrage at an institution that completely deprives men of any form of liberty and justice as they work to protect the freedom of their country. In these chapters, you will also see the seeds of the themes and images that appeared in Melville's later works.

"A blog," you ask? That is exactly what this book is. There are many characters, no plot to speak of, but an incredibly rich garden of facts, opinions ideas and observations. It does little to flatter the U.S. Navy of the mid-1800's but provides a richly detailed and distinctly un-romanticized view of the lives of those who served. If you're a fan of Melville or just like books about sailing the seas, White Jacket is a must-read.

Reading this book made me realize how much I have in common with the sailors of old in our illustrious Navy. We all hate general quarters. This book is a good read for anyone looking for a more indepth look at what naval life was/is like. Underways are long, port visits are short ( and more restricted than ever), and you never feel at home no matter where you go. Naval life is great but it isn't a adventurous as some writers tend to make it appear. To have adventures you must go it alone or pick a liberty buddy with similar ideas.

It's often said that, in 'Huckleberry Finn', "life is a river". 'White-Jacket', Herman Melville's fifth novel, may be his take on this: "the world is a ship". In fact, the subtitle of 'White-Jacket' is 'The World in a Man-of-War'. This is an interesting idea for an allegory and, in many ways, Melville suceeds. Using the events on the man-of-war Neversink, Melville draws many parallels to society in general and human justice in particular. Further, in the final chapter, Melville provides a moral to tie his allegory together.

However, despite these successes, 'White-Jacket' pretty much fails as a novel. The main problem is that Melville exercises no control over his allegory. 'White-Jacket' contains far too much content that doesn't add to the allegory, and some of it clearly is not even meant to. While every word and chapter does not necessarily have to drive an allegory (unless you're Dante and writing something genius like 'The Divine Comedy'), the narrative that does not propel the allegory should have some point. Unfortunately, that is not the case here and it makes 'White-Jacket' pretty tedious.

The excess material is especially frustrating because 'White-Jacket' quite simply tells no story. There is no plot, no character development, no conflict, nothing other than the allegory. So if a chapter doesn't fit in with the allegory, it really serves no purpose whatsoever! And, quite frankly, if Melville had honed his allegory the way he should have, his final chapter - which is terribly prosaic - would not have been required.

Oddly, it seems to me that in writing his fourth, fifth, and sixth novels, Melville repeats the path he took with 'Typee', 'Omoo', and 'Mardi' (his first three). His fourth book ('Redburn') was like 'Typee', even though 'Typee' was more romantic and 'Redburn' darker. Both are quite successful works, tell a great story, and have clear themes communicated by those stories. 'Omoo' suffered from a directionless narrative that never came together as a story, very much like what we have with 'White-Jacket'. In his third book, Melville made an ambitious attempt at something deeper and, since his sixth book is 'Moby-Dick', the parallel seems to hold.

I also found myself thinking of 'Redburn' and 'White-Jacket' as two halves of the whole that would become 'Moby-Dick'. 'Redburn' focuses on the story, and 'White-Jacket' focuses on an all-encompassing theme. In 'Moby-Dick', Melville would attempt both in a single novel. In addition, 'Moby-Dick''s theme of the microcosm echoes the 'world in a man-of-war' theme in 'White-Jacket'.

Okay, all that said, is this a book worth reading? The answer is 'no', unless you're interested in delving into Melville's development as a writer or have an urge to learn in great detail what it was like to serve on a man-of-war in the 1800s. Bottom-line, in 'White-Jacket', Melville was overtly trying to write another 'tale of the sea' to earn money and regain the attention of his readers, while creating a deeper work 'under the radar'. However, the lack of plot means the book fails dismally as the former and the lack of control by Melville undermines the latter. 'White-Jacket' could have been much better, but Melville clearly needed more time, effort, and craft on this novel to realize this potential.

If you find yourself in a position where the individuals in authority over you are, in the actual state of affairs, your moral inferiors, then on this level alone you will be able to appreciate this book.

I feel quite strange presuming to give a numerical rating to a book by one of American literature's greatest authors.

It's important for readers to realize that White-Jacket is not what would, in the modern day, be considered a novel. There is essentially no plot structure. It's a melange of events, descriptive passages and polemic, narrated by the eponymous White-Jacket, whom I suspect of being Melville himself. At times the book is entertainingly humorous - as when the narrator tries to get rid of his famous jacket. And much of the description of life aboard a man-of-war is fascinating -- the book would make a helpful companion for people reading modern novels such as O'Brian's series. (And, of course, White-Jacket probably was one of the sources used by O'Brian and other aquatic novelists.) The polemic -- Melville's rants against flogging and his pacifist pleas -- I found tiresome, as I always find polemic, regardless of its aims.