Sign in with Facebook
Seth T.'s Reviews > Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
by
by
How to Read Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick is so great and funny and rollicking. I put it off ’til my 40s, having been lied to by so many people for so long that I believed reading it would be like eating my vegetables - good to have done, sure, but not an enjoyable way to spend my time. People actually describe this dizzy book as a slog. I think people got off on the wrong foot, thinking Moby-Dick was supposed to be this dour, dignified affair and because of that never actually grasped what they were reading.
So here we have our narrator. Old man Ishmael, a real eyeful. He’s basically one of those old guys at your local coffee spot who is there at 5:30 every morning til about 11:00 in the same chair at the same table and he always has a flock of 15-minute friends flitter by for a story or two and boy does he have stories and boy will he tell them. He’s got opinions by the boatload and only a quarter of them are political. He drives you nuts but you love him, and really everybody loves him, and even the people who shout “F★★★ off!” and storm out after talking to him are there the next day for more of his wacky stories.
That’s Ishmael, this old salt tattoo’d stem-to-stern except for a bare spot reserved for a poem he’ll maybe one day write, perhaps a rhyme about Nantucket. He’s by this point sailed every sea and survived every kind of voyage, but now he’s going to tell you about one of his first. But damned if he’ll let the story get in the way of his telling of it.
Ishmael careens from decorated wall to decorated wall in his telling, now he speaks of the beauty and terrible uncanny awfulness of whiteness, now he justifies his opinion that whales are FISH THAT HAVE LUNGS, now he explains the jovial natural depravity of those who work the Erie Canal, now he calls the dictionary Noah Webster’s Word-ark (Noah’s word-ark! heavens!), now he scoffs at the drawings of whales found in Authoritative Books, now he has Stubb say that whales, for all their malignancy, naturally handle their foes the whalemen with mittens.
And now suddenly he’s telling us the story of how he years later told some sailors in Peru the story of a mutiny on the Town-Ho that he was told by the sailors involved. Instead of, you know, telling us the story of a mutiny on the Town-Ho. Here’s a narrator so in love with the way he once told a story that he tells the Story Of That Telling rather than the object of that story but somehow includes the object story within the story of that story? Dizzying!
And then he ends a chapter discussing whale skeletons with this awesome bit:
Picture it! Ishmael, having discovered the skeletal dimensions of the sperm whale, gets them tatted to his arm so he’ll remember BUT he is careful to shave off inches so he’ll have room to tat on a poem he was thinkin ’bout - and too much of him was already inked.
And people call this book a slog! Imagine that.
Moby-Dick is so great and funny and rollicking. I put it off ’til my 40s, having been lied to by so many people for so long that I believed reading it would be like eating my vegetables - good to have done, sure, but not an enjoyable way to spend my time. People actually describe this dizzy book as a slog. I think people got off on the wrong foot, thinking Moby-Dick was supposed to be this dour, dignified affair and because of that never actually grasped what they were reading.
So here we have our narrator. Old man Ishmael, a real eyeful. He’s basically one of those old guys at your local coffee spot who is there at 5:30 every morning til about 11:00 in the same chair at the same table and he always has a flock of 15-minute friends flitter by for a story or two and boy does he have stories and boy will he tell them. He’s got opinions by the boatload and only a quarter of them are political. He drives you nuts but you love him, and really everybody loves him, and even the people who shout “F★★★ off!” and storm out after talking to him are there the next day for more of his wacky stories.
That’s Ishmael, this old salt tattoo’d stem-to-stern except for a bare spot reserved for a poem he’ll maybe one day write, perhaps a rhyme about Nantucket. He’s by this point sailed every sea and survived every kind of voyage, but now he’s going to tell you about one of his first. But damned if he’ll let the story get in the way of his telling of it.
Ishmael careens from decorated wall to decorated wall in his telling, now he speaks of the beauty and terrible uncanny awfulness of whiteness, now he justifies his opinion that whales are FISH THAT HAVE LUNGS, now he explains the jovial natural depravity of those who work the Erie Canal, now he calls the dictionary Noah Webster’s Word-ark (Noah’s word-ark! heavens!), now he scoffs at the drawings of whales found in Authoritative Books, now he has Stubb say that whales, for all their malignancy, naturally handle their foes the whalemen with mittens.
And now suddenly he’s telling us the story of how he years later told some sailors in Peru the story of a mutiny on the Town-Ho that he was told by the sailors involved. Instead of, you know, telling us the story of a mutiny on the Town-Ho. Here’s a narrator so in love with the way he once told a story that he tells the Story Of That Telling rather than the object of that story but somehow includes the object story within the story of that story? Dizzying!
And then he ends a chapter discussing whale skeletons with this awesome bit:
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing - at least, what untattooed parts might remain - I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
Picture it! Ishmael, having discovered the skeletal dimensions of the sperm whale, gets them tatted to his arm so he’ll remember BUT he is careful to shave off inches so he’ll have room to tat on a poem he was thinkin ’bout - and too much of him was already inked.
And people call this book a slog! Imagine that.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
Moby-Dick or, The Whale.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
January 20, 2024
– Shelved
