Is Moby Dick really about Whaling?
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?
To be left overnight adrift in the ocean!!
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.