“Moby Dick is the closest 19th century English got to Shakespeare and Milton”
People say that, and certainly there’s an attempt at grand tragedy. However, when’s the last time you actually tried to read it? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I metaphorically threw up. I may not fully understand Shakespeare or Milton without careful rereading and footnote checking, but I can buzz through the text without it feeling like a chore.
Other so-called classic literature has big flaws: “Don Quixote” is too hopelessly repetitive to read all at once, and “War and Peace” has mystifying chapter-long digressions on historical philosophy. I don’t argue with their inclusion. “Moby Dick” is of a different kind, its flaws being in my opinion more endemic. The nautical stuff is boring and repetitive. Its digressions, too, are intrusive. That’s not entirely it. Its characters aside from Ahab are disposible, but that’s not it either.
I find it from the first page to the last wholly pretentious. This is not man’s war with nature, God, or himself. The book doesn’t earn such grand dimensions. Put down your essays, academia; it’s about a crazy guy who hates a whale. There, I said it.
Ultimately, though, that’s not it either. It’s nothing more complicated than that the book is so damn boring that I can’t read it. And for the record, it’s not the period or Melville himself, as I got through “Bartleby” and “Billy Budd” just fine.
I’ve read it more than once and love it. It’s hilarious and a wonderful fairy tale. Interchapter-like digressions had been common in fiction up until the 20th century. They go back to Don Quixote and in English back to Fielding and Sterne. The Whaling interchapters in MD are actually metaphors and the Historical Philosophy chapters in ‘War and Peace’ can easily be skipped.