Study Guide

I think this may be the fourth time I read Moby-Dick since I was 12 or so. Re-reading is always tricky, especially books that you've carried with you this long: I've developed as a reader every time, but it seems designed to develop with its readers.

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.

At its heart it's such a simple story. Naïve sailor - call him Ishmael - signs on for a 3-year whaling voyage, and once they've left port he and the rest of the crew discover that the captain, Ahab, is obsessed with taking revenge on one specific whale, the great white whale Moby Dick who bit Ahab's leg off on an earlier trip. And so, Ishmael tells us, everything went more and more to pieces... but in order to understand that we also have to understand something about whales, and whaling, and how and why and where and whence and...

”Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, ”that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

The first time, I read it as a straight adventure novel with nerdy whale facts mixed in. Rereading, I picked up on the metaphors, and boy, can you find those here, especially since the novel doesn't really work as a straight-up adventure. There are too many digressions, too much lecturing, not to mention that the characters that start off as protagonists are soon eclipsed by Ahab and his mates. So yeah, the image of Ahab fleeing the safety of home to chase... well, God or Existence or Meaning or one of those things, the great whale who can never be caught, remains unknown even if you devote your life to it, all that. Take one more step and it's a Kafka-style comedy - a genuinely funny novel, with both slapstick comedy and a narrator who occasionally lets his own story run away with him, ranting like he's halfway through a bottle of rum and telling the greatest fishing story ever. Which of course he is. But the punchline, we're never quite allowed to forget, is death and our own insignificance on a huge sea.

God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

All of that is still in there when I read the book today. But I'll be damned if the thing that strikes me this time is that it's an anatomy. Or a bible, which may be the same thing. Not literally, though it's an interesting question what Melville might have done if he'd had a chance to read The Origin Of Species and plunder it for narratives. But what Moby-Dick seems to want to do, in all those wild thrashings from action scenes to moonlit walks on the deck, Bible and Shakespeare allusions mixed with sea shanties, dumb jokes leading into profound philosophical questions on free will which give way to what are basically 19th-century blog posts on the role of the whale in art history... It's nothing less than an attempt to draw a complete picture of what it means to be a man. Or an animal. In as much as there's any difference. Moby-Dick switches genre, tone, format with every chapter because they're all different body parts of a Frankensteinian monster of ideas.

And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts.

Of course it's flawed; a perfect novel must by definition contain imperfections. But how about this: It came out in 1851, when owning and selling people like cattle was still perfectly legal, and takes place on a ship crewed by sailors of all nationalities and ethnicities. Sure, by today's standards Melville('s narrator) comes across as more than a little racist, however much he may insist that "savages" are some sort of people too, but he doesn't take concepts like race and class for granted. He examines them with all the tools he's borrowed allow, questions and teases. He follows a chapter where one of the mates chews out a black crewmember and gives him a pointless job with a chapter on cetology where he sneers that any attempt to divide whales in different classes is futile, it's all subjective anyway. He compares the working-class lads on the Pequod to war heroes, princes, saints, demigods. He anthropomorphises the whales to the point he ascribes religion and long-term planning to them, only to dismiss them as swimming blobs of fat in the next chapter. He makes the narrator and his prejudices part of the story. Layer after layer of alleged civilisation are hauled up from the deep, peeled off, inspected, boiled down to their essence and stowed away for future illumination needs, until the only thing remaining is a fight for territory between two old males, the man and the whale, man and mystery.

Ahab is one of the great literary characters for a reason, as complex as his novel. A powerful cripple, a madman who sees his own madness clearly, obsessed and prepared to sacrifice everything, yet with a humanity and a charisma that means he'd rather convince his men to follow him of their own free will than force them. They say the novel flopped in the 1850s because nobody could imagine anyone following a madman like that; after the trenches of WW1, it suddenly became a classic.

A bible, I said. Not the kind that wants to explain an existing religion to faithful followers, one that wants to pick apart. Melville himself called it blasphemous, and it is, in the best way. Our narrator fails to see any distinction between his own Christianity and Queequeg's idolatry, Ahab denies all authority but himself, the most religious person on board is only paralysed by his faith. A whale represents Satan, or God, or the question if there's any difference; everything's a process, all categories man-made. But there's more to heresy than simply cursing the pope or drawing a doodle of Mohammed. It's about understanding and then appropriating a narrative. Moby-Dick keeps digressing because that's what a bible does, throws out tendrils of burning cities and sinking ships, history and ethics, until it contains everyting.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

What Moby-Dick doesn't offer is salvation, even at the point of rebirth. At best a lifesaver for the randomly chosen survivors. A small creature clinging to a floating coffin, in the middle of an ocean where titans just fought to the death. And brings back a story full of contradictions and flaws, death and destruction, but so beautiful that he can't shut up about it and only dreams of going back out again.


Well, technically I didn't read it this time, I listened to it through the podcast The Moby-Dick Big Read, where 136 different people from Sir David Attenborough, Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch to perfectly ordinary readers each get to read a chapter of the book as they see it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to a first-time reader - while most of it's good, it inevitably becomes a rather disjointed affair with every conceivable pronounciation of the characters and settings, shifting sound quality etc - but somehow it fits perfectly for a novel that seems to what to say everything.