Why Read Moby-Dick

such force that they “started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer.” After a whale has been cut up, the Pequod ’s crew use block and tackle to “drag out [the] teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood-lands.” When a sperm whale’s severed head accidentally drops back down into the sea, it hits “with a thunder-boom . . . like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool.” The “thick curled bush of white mist” rising from a massive herd of sperm whales looks “like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.” We are on the deck of the Pequod with Captain Ahab, but we are also visiting the scenes, commonplace and noteworthy, of inland America.
    Despite Moby-Dick ’s often dark and ominous themes, Melville obviously had great fun writing this book. Listen to him here as, tongue in cheek, he proclaims the novel’s audacious scope. “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” Moby-Dick is a true epic, embodying almost every powerful American archetype as it interweaves creation myths, revenge narratives, folktales, and the conflicting impulses to create and to destroy, all played out across the globe’s vast oceanic stage.
    There is a wonderful slapdash quality to the book. Melville inserts chapters of biology, history, art criticism, you name it, sometimes at seeming random. Ishmael is the narrator, but at times Melville invests him with an authorial omniscience. It’s a violation of the supposed laws of fiction writing; but who cares? In this book, especially the chapter titled “Ce-tology,” which contains some of the funniest parody writing you’ll ever find, Melville is out to lay bare his own creative process as well as the absurdity of our attempts to classify and quantify our lives into manageable, understandable entities. “[T]hough of real knowledge there be little,” Ishmael confides, “yet of books there are a plenty.” Ishmael creates a ridiculously complex classification system for whales but is finally left trying to account for some species that don’t fit in his system, dismissing these unclassifiable whales as “full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.” Like Melville’s book, Ishmael’s “cetological System” can never be fully completed. “For small erections may be finished by their first architects,” he declares; “grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”
    Even the beginning of the book is a magnificent mess. Contrary to what many people assume, Moby-Dick starts not with Ishmael but with “Etymology,” a listing of obscure quotations and translations supposedly collected by “a late consumptive usher to a grammar school.” As if that’s not enough, Melville follows “Etymology” with “Extracts,” a seemingly endless compilation of whale-related passages that takes up a full thirteen pages in the Penguin edition of the novel. From the beginning, Melville is challenging the reader with both his scholarship and his wit. By the time you reach chapter 1, you know you are in for a most quirky and demanding ride.
    There is an inevitable tendency to grow impatient with the novel, to want to rush and even skip over what may seem like yet another extraneous section and find out what, if anything, is going to happen next to Ahab and the Pequod . Indeed, as the plot is left to languish and entire