Moby Dick

Herman Melville

First, a good portion of the book is about whales, academically.

Seriously, if you're very interested in whales, read Moby Dick,
because it surely contains much more information about them than
any single encyclopedia. The problem is when you're not really
that interested in whales, at least not to this level of detail.

Second, most of the book is philosophy. The plot could be wholly

told in about 15 pages, none omitted. The rest is philosophy and
whale-encyclopedia.

The problem with the book is that Melville is a tease. The first
80 pages presents itself as a charming, funny, intriguing tale of
life in whaling. He writes very well, and has some brilliant prose
and pacing. But he slowly unwinds the book into wider and wider
circles of pedantry, indulgence, and esoteric ramblings that more
than try your patience. Ahab, the most well-known character from
the book, can’t be mentioned on more than 80 of the 544 pages of
the edition I read. The majority of the book is a whaling manual
of sorts, with encyclopedia-like entries and opinion essays on
various aspects of whales, whaling, and seafaring culture.
Melville also shifts narrative form wildly in the book, sometimes
he’s Ishmael, sometimes he’s Melville, sometimes he’s a sort of
movie-style narrator (approximating Shakespearean stage
direction). I suspect the movie version with Gregory
Peck (screenplay by Ray Bradbury) provides the experience many
people would expect in the book. I haven’t seen the movie, but
plan to, just to compare.

I diligently read every page, resisting the urge to skim and skip,
exploring if I could resisting the temptations of my attention.
And in so doing I learned how much wider the idea of a novel is
than I’d thought it could be. He successfully (at least in terms
of posthumous readership, the book didn’t sell that well in his
lifetime) manages to twist the concept of a novel into various odd
shapes, with strange and unwieldy corners – it made me rethink the
notion of what a book, fiction or non-fiction, can be like. As a
writer I’m glad I read the whole thing.

The best possible take on the book is that Melville desired to

give the reader a similar obsession about the white whale to the
one Ahab has. The longer the book went on, the stronger the sense
of craving, and then obsession, I had for the core narrative to
continue. As Ahab hunts the whale, so does the reader hunt the
story of Ahab and the whale in the book. A minority of the non-
narrative chapters are exceptional essays The Hyena, The Monkey
Rope, Fast-Fish & Loose Fish, and the chapter on the concept of
white) that I marked well and might reread. A dozen or so passages
in the book, often about Ahab or philosophy, are exceptional. But
for a book of this length I had a fairly low number of passages
marked to return to and reread.

To me, the lesson in Moby Dick is this: Like the loss of Ahab’s
leg, there are things in life that happened in the past that can
become an obsession for us if we let them. Any wrong done to us,
deep pain or grudge can quickly become something that drives all
meaning of life from us. These kind of unhealthy obsessions
destroy the people who follow them. Moby Dick was
unbeatable. Why? Because a whale is stronger or smarter than
man? No, because of what it represented. If you feed that grudge
you’ve had for 20 years, you’ll never move on or get over it – but
in the end, it will destroy you. If you let a past wrong doing
fester inside for long periods of time, it, like Moby Dick, is not
something you can conquer by heaping hate and animosity on top of
the situation. What Captain Ahab never learned was beating Moby
Dick was not killing him – it was letting him go. Don’t hang on
to things you can’t change!

Moby Dick was an educational read. There were many references to

Biblical characters and verses that no doubt, have great
significance if you want to unravel deeper levels of meaning in
the story. The story itself wasn’t so bad of a read, but when you
get into the blubber, ribs and scull size, it gets what I call,
“hard reading.” If you, like me, want to understand the whole
meaning behind a new movie – dig into Moby Dick. Details that
would have been lost on me when watching the movie came alive in
ways only someone who read the book could understand. You’ll learn
a lot and maybe even enjoy the storyline. But if you’re not into
thinking too hard about the debate behind why a whale’s skin is or
is not 12 inches thick, this may not be the book for you!
 FILAMER CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
ROXAS AVENUE, ROXAS CITY

BOOK REVIEW
(SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY ENGENEERING MATHEMATIC)

SUBMITTED BY:
Luke Quen B. Villar
SUBMITTED TO:
MS. WHANE R. CABUSLAY