"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

I've done it. I've conquered the "white whale," the endlessly-metaphor-ready novel of English literature. And like Ahab (of course, because we're all Ahab), the path was long and treacherous, with high hopes, fits and starts, and (okay, the simile's not particularly apt) an entirely benign conclusion.

I started Moby Dick a few years ago, inspired by an educator's event at the Contemporary Arts Center on an exhibit inspired by the novel. One artist had drawn an illustration over each page of the book. "I'll read a page each day!" I had decided. I think I imagined I'd write some sort of response too. Though I did occasionally make annotations, the page-a-day petered out almost immediately. Still, I made some progress over the years, picking it up here and there. This year, realizing I had perhaps 100 pages left, I decided it was time to resolvedly confront the Leviathan.

It's funny how hard the book is. It shouldn't be. I've read significantly longer books. The prose is archaic by today's standards, but it's not more challenging than the prose of Melville's contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose The Scarlet Letter I teach), and it's certainly easier than the more opaque post-modernist writers. It's simplest to blame the challenge of reading on the novel's structure, its frequent departures from the primary narrative. After all, Melville dedicates more pages to arguing that whales are fish than he does on the final chase of Moby Dick--but, then again, I love non-traditional books. Or perhaps it's the awareness that there's meaning that's just above your head, a sense that the teacher would laugh at you the next day when you innocently asserted the novel was "about a whale." But I'm an English teacher!

Probably it's a combination of all of the above, in conjunction with Moby Dick's vaunted position in the English canon. It's a book I found frustrating, boring, and tedious but also fascinating, funny, and compelling. I'm glad I read it.

Reading what I've written so far, it's clear that reading Moby Dick is more about the reader's journey (oh, the metaphors!) than the novel itself. Still, Moby Dick is, nominally, about the monomaniacal Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, Moby Dick, who cost Ahab his leg. It's narrated by Ishmael, whose character frames the opening of the novel before dropping out completely. In fact, though Ishmael continues to narrate and is present during the final chase, he doesn't insert himself back in until the epilogue, after everyone else on the whaling ship Pequod has met their watery doom. The linear narrative plays only a minor role in the novel, however. Instead, the reader learns a lot about whale anatomy. About the heavenly feel of spermaceti. About Biblical references to whales. About other ships the Pequod encounters. About how easy it is to weave the word "unctuous" into prose. 

And we also learn about human purpose and fate, about our drive even in the face of insurmountable odds. I just finished teaching The Road to my juniors, and a student remarked that McCarthy's message seems similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's closing line of The Great Gatsby (which we studied in the fall): "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." It's the same final message we get in Moby Dick, maybe the American message, or maybe simply the message of humanity. 

Come for the spermaceti. Stay for the message about us all.