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sethdmichaels.bsky.social · @sethdmichaels.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Moby-Dick or, The Whale 10/10

Finally decided to tackle this one at the end of this year. Go into it knowing it's as long and dense and uncomfortably-of-its-time and explicitly-expository-about-whaling as its reputation suggests, but there's a reason it's such a big deal. Thematically, it's a kind of precursor to existentialism; it's basically a book-length extension of the argument from Job 40-41 in which God tells Job that he can't begin to understand God's will, and uses as an example the fact that whales exist. <br/><br/>The plot is pretty simple and if you're glancingly familiar with American literature you know it. Our narrator Ishmael joins a whaling ship whose captain, Ahab, is obsessed with hunting down a notorious white whale, and the whole thing goes very badly for everyone. The title character doesn't appear for the first 95% of the book, and much of Ishmael's time is spent explaining in painstaking detail what a whaling voyage actually entails and what a batshit crazy idea it is to dedicate it to finding and killing one specific whale. <br/><br/>While the plot is obviously very rich with theme and metaphor, Ishmael/Melville wants to be very clear that it's also extremely ~real~: the world of the mid-19th century was lit by whale oil, and the process of getting that oil is a complex industry, both incredibly dangerous and deeply gross. He only explicitly says it once, but the idea hangs over the whole book that you shouldn't take the oil in your lamp for granted because men have to risk their lives at sea and slaughter giant animals to get it. Melville really wants you to understand, as the reader, that you probably don't know very much about whaling and that there's a lot to it, and all of that context is background so you understand just what it means that Ahab is taking all of these men with him into his obsession.<br/><br/>On one level, plotwise it's like one of those action movies where a ragtag band of oddballs has to accomplish a difficult task - and the crew of Ahab's ship is ethnically diverse and a mix of personalities. It is very much a mid-19th century book in the language it uses around race, but is also weirdly woke and celebratory of diversity by the standards of its time. In the early going there's some straight-up romantic energy between Ishmael and Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooner.<br/><br/>The theme, again, is existentialist. We're all doomed, we can't begin to understand the will of God, humans don't amount to very much in the grand scheme of things, all human endeavor can be compared to a futile voyage heading for certain death, we're all (Christian and "savage," old and young, mad and sane) just people fumbling in the dark. "The world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete," says a preacher near the beginning, and constantly we are reminded by Ishmael, Ahab or someone else that we're small moving parts in a big, scary, inscrutable world. <br/><br/>For all that ways that the book is a tough slog for a modern reader, I actually quite enjoyed it. I found myself highlighting turns of phrase and moments pretty frequently. It took a long time but I'm glad for having done it.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 14:45 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere