Is Moby Dick really about Whaling?

[Eddie@hotmail]

I can't get rid of the thought that Mellville was describing something else than just a whaling advanture.
Maybe the boring parts are exactly the parts where Mellville by using analogy explains something else.
The book is about a journey or an expedition all right, but what kind of journey? Is it only an advanture book?
I wonder why Mellville would write a book which became responsible for his drop in popularity at the time, and why he didn't even try to be popular again. Maybe he didn't know what he was doing writing the book. But then again one can read in Wikipedia aobut him: "In his later life, his works were no longer popular with a broad audience because of their increasingly philosophical, political and experimental tendencies."
Maybe he knew exactly what he was writing; maybe we can't read between the lines as he intended for us to do.
What is/was he trying to tell us?

[B-Mental]

Well, what other possible interpretations are their of this book. I'm lacking ingenuity or imagination, because I can't think of any other possibilities. I found one of the points of the boring stretches to follow the journey realistically. Also the most fearsome thing that could happen to me would be to be left overnight adrift in the ocean. This book is stellar in my opinion...but I read it of my own choice. I think to be forced to read this it would be more difficult.

[JCamilo]

Moby Dick interpretations are many that include the famous allegory of the world, the idea about the man challenging god while trying to understand him, etc.
Moby Dick is in many ways a precursor of moderm literature because the free use of allegory and possibility of interpretations (Anyone should try Billy Budd or Benito Cereno, two other little masterworks of Melville).
And it is also about whaling.

[Eddie@hotmail]

Brilliant! Because that is exactly the situation Ahab was in. But what is there to be afraid of? What is the absolutely worse thing that can happen? End up in the dark water of the ocean facing the enormous Moby Dick with a little knife? Loosing a leg? See everybody else in the water struggling for their life?

Seeing and feeling that this is it this is the end of the line the whale is going to kill me.

But all of this is something that eventually will happen to all of us. Whether we run from it or face it like Ahab did.

I love this quotation so much that I put it here again:
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

Somehow this bok is not only about Ahab, but about everybody who has set course to kill their own white headed whale of ignorance and false notions.

[Babbalanja]

The novel is about whaling, but also about obsession, purpose, and the human condition.

I just got into Melville late last year, and I've read some of his major works for the first time. Moby-Dick is one of the most mind-blowing pieces of fiction I've ever encountered. And I'm a fan of twentieth-century eccentric writers like Burroughs and Pynchon, so it's hard to shock me.

I've heard from plenty of people that the digressions into whaling procedures in Moby-Dick are interminable and irrelevant, but I disagree. Ishmael is a fusspot, and his obsession with whaling information parallels Ahab's murderous purpose. Whaling is a business, a process, and a way of life for Ishmael. However, Ahab's only aim is destruction.

Consider all this: and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Moby-Dick, Chapter 58

[Eddie@hotmail]

I think Moby Dick is not written to shock anybody. It is written to wake you up so you push off from that isle, to never return to the insular Tahiti. But this is nothing we do if we are OK or satisfied with the way every thing is. A certain amount of dissatisfaction is necessary. That is the reason why Ahab is out whaling.
As for Ishmael, he is done whaling. The obsession was Ahab's.
Beautiful choice of quote!

[Babbalanja]

I think Moby Dick is not written to shock anybody. It is written to wake you up so you push off from that isle, to never return to the insular Tahiti.

That's a very perceptive point. In terms of literature and philosophy, Moby-Dick was indeed trying to challenge people to redefine their expectations. Melville had first done this with the wonderfully over-the-top Mardi, but his talent had yet to mature. At last, with Moby-Dick, he wrote a gripping seafaring tale with profound philosophical depth.

[ennison]

Not about whaling!! Blimey no wonder my whaling business based on Melvillian principles failed.

[Babbalanja]

Not about whaling!! Blimey no wonder my whaling business based on Melvillian principles failed.

Melville himself was a lousy businessman. He actually mortgaged his farm to two different creditors. Creative financing isn't as readily appreciated as creative prose.

He was just as idiosyncratic in his approach to biology. Here Ishmael parodies the contemporary mania for classification by denying that whales are mammals:

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm, bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege naturae jure meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

[Eddie@hotmail]

Not about whaling!! Blimey no wonder my whaling business based on Melvillian principles failed.

LOL ... very funny... I like your sense of humor.
You should read the entire book before you base your whaling business on it
The point is that Ahab or anybody else for that matter can NOT kill or capture the whale. What it comes to is that the aspect of you which want to kill or control the whale disappears with the whale and only the Ishmael part of you will be left.

[blp]

Consider all this: and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Moby-Dick, Chapter 58

Oddly enough, this passage, which comes right at the end of the chapter, is the very last thing I read before looking at these threads.

[blp]

I think Moby Dick is not written to shock anybody. It is written to wake you up so you push off from that isle, to never return to the insular Tahiti. But this is nothing we do if we are OK or satisfied with the way every thing is. A certain amount of dissatisfaction is necessary. That is the reason why Ahab is out whaling.
As for Ishmael, he is done whaling. The obsession was Ahab's.
Beautiful choice of quote!

You could argue it's rather the reverse: that Ahab can't accept the wildness of the sea and hopes to end the danger by seeking out the thing in it that hurt him. Mistaking the thing contained for the container, if you like. Ishmael's the one who is able to face it all and the weight of factual information represents that, a mature receptivity to the mad complexity of life.

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

I'm reading this and I have to say that so far I'm seeing a 'you create your own evil' perspective going on. Ahab creates his evil out of Moby-Dick. Ismael's philosophical pondering leads me to the impression that nature is light and free spirit and 'hath no confine'. Ahab takes everything literally and if he considers it evil, it must. the impression I get is an old philosophical one. Basically, there are no good and evil but it is human nature to place certain aspects of the world in categories such as these two.

[isidro]

Perhaps Melville cared more about being true to himself than popularity. Popularity isn't everything of course.

I think the effect was excellent in that you learn so much in the course of the book that once at the end you feel as though you really have circumnavigated the earth. And if I am not mistaken this was written at a time when the industrial age was taking over and people were more sentimental about working with one's hands and tending to the details of work, as in Robinson Crusoe.

Either way, I stand quite grateful that he wrote it as it captured so much intelligence and beautiful writing between two covers.