Books I'm Reading: Moby Dick

It was 34 years ago that I first read Melville's Moby Dick. I was 28 at the time and I enjoyed it immensely. I was grateful then (and still now) that no one had forced me to read it in high school--that no one had ruined it for me. When I read it, I wanted to read it, and I went on to read most of Melville's other seafaring tales, among them Billy Budd, Omoo, and Typee. I've just finished reading Moby Dick for the second time. 

I remembered quite a lot about it. In some places I remembered the text in considerable detail, while some parts I had virtually no memory of at all.

The book is sprawling and choppy and unfocused, but that's part of its charm, I suppose--if you have the patience to take it as it comes. There are numerous chapters that make no contribution to plot advancement at all--chapters designed to explain the practical aspects of whale hunting and the economics of whaling with a view to allowing the reader to understand the details of action in chapters ahead, for example, or short, descriptive chapters that simply describe downtime for a sailor on a Nantucket whaler in the 1850s (and among these are some of the most beautiful passages in the book), and even some chapters that seem entirely unrelated to the story (for example, a early pub scene in which the narrator, Ishmael, relates a yarn about another voyage altogether).

I'd forgotten how funny Moby Dick is in places and also how little of the book involves the white whale of the title. There are 136 chapters in all, including the epilogue. The edition I read (Collins Classics, 2021) is 589 pages long. Moby Dick, the whale, doesn't appear until page 561, in Chapter 133. Once he does appear, the action is fast and furious, though. The world collapses around Captian Ahab, his ship, the Pequod, and Ishmael virtually all at once, underscoring (like so much else in the book) the fragility and incomprehensibility of life. Only Ishmael survives the final disaster, eventually rescued by another ship, hanging on to a wooden float fashioned from what had originally been a coffin.