why is moby dick such a great book

I re-read Moby Dick a couple of years ago now and found it such a moving and all enveloping experience that whenever I think of the book now I feel like i'm being swept away!

And I wanted to ask how do other people feel about this book?

Does anyone have any theories as to why it's such a great book?

Does anyone disagree and think it rubbish?

What is the book really about? (by which I mean, why is a book about whaling still relevant to me living here in London, working in an office?)

I guess I have my own theories about the book, but really want to hear some other peoples...

please excuse my grammer!

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Originally Posted by londonhector

And I wanted to ask how do other people feel about this book?

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I love it! My favourite novel by far. I will never get tired of reading it.

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Originally Posted by londonhector

Does anyone have any theories as to why it's such a great book?

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Language, ambition and depth put Moby Dick amongst the greatest of books but, for me, it is the character of Ishmael which makes it stand out. He is a very welcoming narrator. Yes, he wants to show off his erudition and talk interminably about whales but I never find him condescending. Rather, he is unassuming, amiable and really, really wants me to find whales as interesting as he does. It is the most infectiously enthusiastic book I can think of and of all fictional characters Ishmael is the one I would most like to have as a friend.

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Originally Posted by londonhector

What is the book really about? (by which I mean, why is a book about whaling still relevant to me living here in London, working in an office?)

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Most people agree that Ahab's pursuit of the whale is a metaphor for obsession and insatiable desire. I would be more particular and say that the book is about the pursuit of (unobtainable) knowledge and the hubris of thinking we can ever know what is true. I think this passage from the chapter The Lee Shore is instructive:

Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!

This is why the cetology chapters are important. The book constantly balances knowledge learned from books against knowledge from experience. Is the whale a fish or a mammal? Does it have skin or blubber? A zoologist would give one answer, a 19th century whaleman another. The categorisation of knowledge reveals its subjectivity. The Doubloon chapter makes this point explicitly.

The fact that it is a novel about, on one hand, blind ambition in the face of impossibility (Ahab) and on the other, being lost and swept up in the world you find yourself in (Ishmael) makes it timeless despite the heavy theology and manuals on whaling.
Broken down in this general way, Moby-Dick can easily be paired with Great Gatsby - and you can see why both these books really stand atop the cannon.

And of course, Melville's language and patience really does allow you to be emerged in the novel in a wonderful way.

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Originally Posted by londonhector

I re-read Moby Dick a couple of years ago now and found it such a moving and all enveloping experience that whenever I think of the book now I feel like i'm being swept away!

And I wanted to ask how do other people feel about this book?

Does anyone have any theories as to why it's such a great book?

Does anyone disagree and think it rubbish?

What is the book really about? (by which I mean, why is a book about whaling still relevant to me living here in London, working in an office?)

I guess I have my own theories about the book, but really want to hear some other peoples...

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Is it a great book?
The book is about mans relationship with God. The whale symbolizes God. And Ahab is a dick.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?

I think the book is great because Moby is a big, great whale. Enormous!

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Originally Posted by E.A Rumfield

Is it a great book?
The book is about mans relationship with God. The whale symbolizes God. And Ahab is a dick.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?

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That's just one interpretation among many, and there's hardly any one "right" interpretation. I've never actually heard the whale-is-god theory. Could you explain it?

The white whale has been interpreted as several things--a symbol of humanity, a symbol for nature, an piece in a larger allegory on race, or just some whale. I prefer to think that the white whale is what mankind made it. It started as a peaceful whale, but due to man's intervention, it has been transformed into the monster that it is. We made it. We can see that we made it because of its physical presence--it's scarred from damage, it even has a harpoon sticking out of it. The only reason it's angry is because we made it that way. So, in that sense it isn't a sum of of humanity, but a product of it, and therefore could be seen as a symbol for the destructiveness and corruptedness of man that's now I see it, anyways.

As for Ahab, he would be the opposite. He is what created the whale--the symbol of evil humanity. Ironically, the whale also made him what he is, too, so there's some complication there. He is a dick, but he's more than that, too.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? We can all argue as to just what the great white whale represents. Ultimately, he may have been nothing more than a whale. But he certainly means something far more to Ahab for whom he has become a symbol of the same God against which Milton's Satan rails... of that implacable "Nature"... red in tooth and claw.

Harold Bloom intriguingly posited Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian... the great, pale white behemoth lacking any moral scruples whatsoever... as both alluding to Moby Dick... and Captain Ahab.

Wow so fantastic to hear other people talking about Moby Dick, even the more cultured people I know have real issues with this book, it's like a jokey by-word for a book that's impenetrable and too long.

I love this book and I think the reason why is that it captures how huge we all feel inside ourselves, the massiveness of our ambition the soaring hugeness of our "souls" and then it captures the hugeness of nature, the terror of the human experience within it. For me it's the exploration of those tardis like russian dolls that blows me away.

Personally I don't find Ahab to be "a dick" I find him quite sympathetic. A man struggling to regain his power and his sanity through an epic quest to come to terms with (and perhaps transcend) his own powerlessness.

And the whale for me is "just a whale" but he represents all the unforgiving, unreasoning power of nature (and thus God) but not as a symbol. As a Whale.

My favourite quote from the book is this ; "be sure of this ,oh young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease"

Sums it up for me that does

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Originally Posted by londonhector

it captures how huge we all feel inside ourselves, the massiveness of our ambition the soaring hugeness of our "souls"

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Yes. Exactly. And then, how small most of us appear on the outside, shrinking away from the sea of ambition to work on a few minor details. But Ishmael braves it all for us.

the bummer for me with the book (i really really disliked it) was that i wanted it to be a true adventure story along the lines of, say, robert louis stevenson or jules verne even...and it was practically anything but that. it read more like a treatise on whaling and my goodness, moby dick himself didnt even appear until the very end...

I agree with you that it's just a whale, and that the book is about the hugeness we feel inside ourselves.

As has been pointed out before, the struggles of generations of critics and readers to explain the book has become a whale-hunt of its own. I studied the book in the 80s, and my notes in my copy suggest I breezily decided it was all about language, in keeping with critical theory fashionable at the time.

I think reality Melville gives us an idea what he's about in the first para - one of the great first paras in Western literature. "Call me Ishmael." and "This is my substitute for pistol and ball." seem important lines - Ishmael sets up a relationship with God, though "Call me" sets up a mask at the same time, and this is the person telling us the story. Ishmael is at the very least a loaded name to use. It's seems safe to assume that an author didn't think about any other words more than he or she thought about the first lines, so the name isn't used by accident.

I remember DH Lawrence being good on Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature, but to be honest can't recall a word now - all that deconstruction did for my memory.