Oh so that’s why Mr Krabs nailed that sandwich to the mast…
One reason I like reading classics is to compare whatever vague impression I’ve gotten through pop culture osmosis and compare it with my experience actually reading the book.
Coming into Moby Dick there were a number of things like the fight of man against nature, but the one I didn’t expect was how INSUFFERABLE the book is.
The narrator of the book is a guy called Ishmael who had sailor experience on the merchant navy but never went to whaling ships. The introduction makes it clear that Ishmael is a smarmy asshole and at that point at the start it’s fine because there’s some nuance to the smarminess, like how whenever he aggrandizes himself too much he soon retracts some of it pointing out he’s not really that good anyways.
There’s only two problems with this… actually three.
The first is that this is a long book (assuming you went the unabridged route like me, do not do that) and it gets old not even by the middle point of it.
The second is that the book LOVES to spend its sweet time in tangents about whales that kill the pace and add absolutely nothing by the end.
And the third problem is that you can’t even excuse it as it being “an Ishmael thing” because every character not named Ahab is completely, absolutely, utterly insufferable.
Except Queequeg, we stan Queequeg in this house.
To the last bit, the main example that comes to mind is this one chapter right after they kill their first whale where Stubb is having a steak of Whale meat and he spends FIVE PAGES annoying the ship’s cook on how overdone the steak was. He tells the cook to go to the sharks on the side of the ship and preach to them to not make so much noise, he insists the cook preach properly by not cursing, he then grills the cook on how overdone the steak is and how the cook is a liar and will not go to heaven for lying and to call him next time he cooks his meal so that he doesn’t mess it up.
There’s a whole section with a French ship where they do a thing where a translator says something while whoever the fuck was boarding the Frensh ship (might be Stubb again) insults the captaint that can’t understand English.
They encounter another ship and there’s a similar “funny” back and forth that goes for way too long while Ahab stares daggers through the two of them.
I could talk about Pip or the other kid that’s not Pip rambling for way too long on a way that’s supposed to be like a kid being sing-song-y… and you know, all of that would be FINE if not for the fact that by the time that happens the reader has had to put up with Ishmael’s eleventh diatribe about why Whalers are so epic.
Here’s how the novel is structured. They will see a whale, then there will be 3 chapter where Ishmael rambles on and on about the anatomy of that whale while calling you an idiot for not knowing that while talking about how whalers are awesome and fucking epic because Ishmael believes that the dragon in Saint George’s story was actually a whale.
Oh, sorry. Leviathan. Because Ishmael insists in calling them Leviathans because Queequeg’s harpoon wasn’t up his ass enough.
At one point there’s a whole story about a mutiny in a different ship being told to some Spanish sailors in a tavern for some reason.
Now, God Emperor of Dune is my favorite book of that bunch, so I SHOULD be all in for author diatribes, but the problem is that this is more like Victor Hugo’s ramblings about Napoleon in the middle of Les Miserables. You put up with it thinking it will pay off only to realize by the end of the novel that IT DIDN’T. YOU COULD’VE SKIPPED THEM AND LITERALLY MISS NOTHING. IN FACT YOU LIFE WOULD BE ALL THE NICER BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T LOSE TIME HEARING ISHMAEL SAY MEXICO IS JUST A FISH WAITING TO BE CLAIMED AS PROPERTY BY THE UNITED STATES.
NO I’M NOT JOKING.
What was America in 1492 but a loose-fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
I’m still wondering how this compares to the part where he basically goes “scientists say whales are mammals and I say they’re fish because I’m the sailor here fuck them”.
I’d say the asides are meant to be directed towards people that have never seen a whaling ship in their lives, but they’re too “what you know is wrong” in tone to be that. And the sad thing is that there IS interesting information in the middle of it, like, I did not know that whaling ships were actually quite clean because a lot of the byproducts of their fishing can be used to make soap. But the density of information is so thin because it’s basically 10% “oh that’s actually neat” and 90% “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP”.
So of course it’s no surprise that people only know about Ahab. Fun fact: Though his presence is there since the introductory chapters, Ahab only makes up about 15% of the actual book and most of it is backloaded when I guess Herman Melville ran out of tangents or was told to just finish the damn book.
In fact, I’d argue all of the tangents are all the more tragic because it’s all time the book could’ve spent… dunno… making me more attached to Stubb instead of making me glad he drowns. Ahab and Starbuck are the most interesting characters of the book in their conflict and by the time it happens you just want the fucking whale to end it all.
But NO we have to exposit in poetic manner on how Ambergris is worth more than jewels or how apparently Ishmael tattoed the measurements of a museum’s whale on his arm while leaving space for “a poem I was composing at the time” and there’s no better summation of his character than that.
Did I mention he’s the one that survives? The book tries to make it a twist at the end with an ironic echo and all, but there’s so many things that can only happen AFTER the trip because at the start of the book Ishmael didn’t know what a whaling ship even was that I wonder why they thought that would be a twist.
My biggest takeout of the book, however, was the idea that a fantasy book in a similar format would go so hard. Ishmael already overexplains whales so hard that they stop sounding like animals. In fact, the whole novel DOES feel like a TTRPG sourcebook.
Introduction with plot, a bunch of loredumps, updates with the plot and skits here and there, and then the epilogue. Half of the work is already done.
Speaking of loredumps, fucking hell I knew MGS5 had Moby Dick on it but I severely underestimated how much Kojima took from it.