Moby Dick - Herman Melville
First published individually 1851.
A number of years ago, when I was working as a milk runner, I used to listen to audiobooks while working, and one of the books I listened to was Moby Dick. I remember enjoying it quite a bit, and "getting" some of the choices the author made. For example, a number of chapters in Moby Dick stop following the plot entirely in order to instead talk about different species of whales, or the physical characteristics of a whale, or the history of whales, or to give a sermon about whales.... all of these could be seen as slowing down the book and giving unnecessary and somewhat dull details. But when I was listening to it all those years ago, I completely understood why they were included.
Moby Dick is about obsession. ALL about obsession. The most obvious example of this obsession is the way that Captain Ahab is obsessed with hunting down Moby Dick, but the whole book embraces this obsession by becoming obsessed itself with whales. Whales are everywhere, from the multiple pages of epigraphs about whales from throughout history that open the book, to descriptions of a painting of a whale at the inn where our narrator spends an evening, to the aforementioned sermon that the narrator overhears while attending church. And so, every tangent, every seemingly pointless chapter, feeds and supports this idea of obsession by demonstrating an obsession with whales.
It's very clever.
The voice of the narrator (I don't remember who it was, but I remember that it was an amateur recording, probably from Libravox) added to the whole theme, by being the right level of interesting and monotonous.
I don't know how better to describe it than that. I was sucked in, while also realising that these tangents were tangents.
Now, as part of my reading challenge for this year, I finally have revisited Moby Dick. This time, however, I have read it as a written book.
It is so much harder to read as a written book.
I still understood the tangents 'intellectually', but when reading them, they drag on, and feel like a distraction from the plot. The wording of Melville, which is purposefully old fashioned (lots of thees and thous and classical illusions) is much more distracting, even bordering on pretentious, when seen written down, rather than simply narrated to you.
I found myself wanting to skip ahead to get to the actual plot, which is not something I felt all those years ago - particularly because while working I would have been unable to easily skip ahead.
So, now I find myself in an interesting situation. For years, I have talked about liking Moby Dick, and defending it against people that found it boring.
Now, however, I understand how people could find it boring, because... dare I say... at times during this read through I became one of them.
And yet, all my previous thoughts about Moby Dick still remain. I still get it. I still enjoy it as an intellectual exercise. I get that this is a Shakespearean level tragedy, with prophecies, and a Macbeth type figure driven to destroy himself and those he loves by chasing after the object of his obsession. I get the soliloquies and asides that give a theatrical bent to proceedings. I get the allusions and the metaphors and the themes of the different ships they encounter.
And potentially, I still enjoy it audibly.
So... I still enjoy the concept of Moby Dick. I enjoy my memories of Moby Dick. And.... I don't think I'll read it again any time soon, if at all.
Completed 8 August 2025.
(2025 Reading Challenge - "A Classic")
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