Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
Summary
A young man calling himself Ishmael goes to sea on a Nantucket whaler and finds that the captain has no interest in whale oil. Ahab lost a leg to a particular white whale and has taken this ship, this crew and the rest of his life to find it again.
That is the story, and it occupies perhaps half the book. The other half is everything else Melville wanted to put in: the anatomy of whales, the history of whaling, the law of salvage, a chapter on the colour white, a sermon, a stage play complete with directions, and a long meditation on rope. Readers who expect a sea adventure and get a lecture on cetacean taxonomy are the reason this novel has a reputation for difficulty.
Here is the useful advice. The digressions are the book, not obstacles in front of it, and once you stop waiting for the plot to resume they become the best part. Melville is extremely funny, far funnier than his reputation allows, and the voice is the reason to keep going: expansive, self mocking, capable of shifting from a joke about bedsharing to genuine terror within a paragraph.
It is long and it is uneven and it does not care. Read it in sections rather than trying to sprint, and let the strange chapters be strange rather than skipping to find Ahab again.
Queequeg, the tattooed harpooneer Ishmael meets in the opening chapters, is one of the warmest characters in American fiction and a large part of why the early section is so loved. Almost nobody who reaches the final chase finds the journey a chore by the end.
Historical Context & Significance
Moby Dick failed. Published in 1851, it sold around three thousand copies in Melville's lifetime and split the reviewers, London's John Bull found "philosophy in whales" and "poetry in blubber," while the Athenaeum filed it under "the worst school of Bedlam literature". Melville's popularity fell away through the 1850s, the book was out of print when he died in 1891, and he was substantially forgotten.
The recovery came thirty years after his death. The centenary of his birth in 1919 prompted the reappraisal now called the Melville Revival, and through the 1920s critics arrived at the reading of the novel that has held ever since.
It is worth sitting with that sequence. The book most often named the great American novel was a commercial failure whose author died believing it had sunk, and its reputation is entirely the work of readers who arrived seventy years late.