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Moby Dick hit me like no novel before or since. A poem in prose form. Attention paid to the littlest of details on the ship, searching for meaning or purpose. A meaning or purpose unveiled in one chapter, but then refuted in the next. Ahab a profound character, who modern critics and teachers will often simply label as “evil” or the “bad guy”. He is a man who has experienced injustice and seeks to pierce the very veil of God/justice to find out why. Is that mad? Yes…but mad in a radically honest sort of way. The White Whale…so many things all at once: a fierce creature, our mortality, injustice, justice, natures power, God Himself. And then the ending…an apocalypse that one survives because of..a coffin. I still think about that novel every couple of weeks. Just stunning.

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> Moby Dick hit me like no novel before or since. A poem in prose form.

Also +1, I was familiar with the book only through exposure to it's symbolic representation in popular culture I.e. a boring 10 pages of plot "diluted" in 1000 pages of autistically compulsive descriptions of whale biology

So one random night before bed I finished the ebook I was reading, felt a little burned out halfway through the 40 book terry pratchet collection, had moby dick on the ereader since it's public domain idk and opened it up because why not ... And stayed up most of the night, read it at every opportunity going forward, and probably highlighted every other sentence as an example of absolutely delightful prose

Amen. The prose is some of the best English one will ever encounter. There are lines in there that stop you in your tracks for their beauty, depth, surprise, etc.

I will say that there were several paragraphs/run-on-sentences where I recall saying to myself “Ok Melville, you’ve gone a little too far this time”…only to find, come the final line, that against all odds he would tie the whole thing together.

> experienced injustice

What was the injustice?

well a whale bit off his leg. lets ignore what he and his countrymen did to other whales and that they started the fight. if you start from the point where he lost his leg, ahab is a hero hell bent on revenge against an evil agressor.

But I mean, who picks an arbitrary point in the middle of a protreacted conflict and decides thats where the score starts being kept from right?

> But I mean, who picks an arbitrary point in the middle of a protreacted conflict and decides thats where the score starts being kept from right?

One of the fun things about the book is it does comprehensively explicate the context, from the perspective of an explicitly unreliable narrator; covering economics, labor relations, division of labor in general, biology, taxonomy, racial/cultural relations, slavery, leadership, technical details of shipping, use of language, obsession and other psychiatric matters, history, law, and lots more

> if you start from the point where he lost his leg, ahab is a hero hell bent on revenge against an evil agressor.

iirc the revenge is explicitly written as doomed from the beginning, the loss of a leg is explicitly treated as a natural consequence of whaling, and there is a bunch of text discussing whether revenge against a whale is even possible (involving the degree to which whales are sentient/moral creatures etc). (also there is some discussion of whether the revenge constitutes a breach of fiduciary responsibility to the vessel owners that would justify a mutiny against the captain, plus discussion even more moral grey areas). Like it is presented as total insanity from a multitude of perspectives

at one of the final meetings between ships towards the end, Ahab encounters a ship sailing in the opposite direction, away from the white whale, and finds out the white whale ate the other captain's arm (iirc). Ahab asks him why he's not chasing down the whale for revenge and the other captain is like "he already got one of my limbs, no need to give him a second".

(A different captain earlier also says i.e. "the risk/reward ratio of chasing 1 tough whale vs many easy whales is not in our favor and our goal is to make money/oil")

More than that, the whale is symbolic of the subconscious, coming to the surface every now and then. The White Whale is Ahab's subconscious, and white is the color of sickness. His obsession, his sickness, came to the surface and killed them all except Ishmael.

There's an entire chapter on "The Whiteness of the Whale." It was the hardest for me to get through, but it kind of beats you into understanding what the author is getting at.

"Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels."

Is that a direct quotation from the novel?

Yes, it's actually Ahab speaking, lol. He goes on to muse that thinking is probably the exclusive domain of God, since thinking requires "a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that." This is the first couple paragraphs of chapter 135, "The Chase. — Third Day".

The words "chapter 135" fill me with dread.

That is a great question. The injustice was that his leg was bitten off by a whale. But the perfectly valid rejoinder would be "well that's just an event, not an injustice, as it was done by a non-moral creature because a whale can't be moral". But that is exactly why Moby-Dick's is so unique: the "bad guy" in the novel is not a human, but the universe itself. A tragic event happened to Ahab and bears resentment against a universe that allows it. Ahab seeks not to defeat man, but nature (and one could say by extension the Creator).

And how did that work out for him?

Why yes, that's the point. It is a tragic tale of hubris, but one of much more existential depth than what teachers will simply label as "Ahab is the bad guy".

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