Moby Dick (Great Illustrated Classics) Paperback – January 1, 2008

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is one of the greatest American contributions to world literature. Although it is often labeled as a novel, and indeed it does begin as one, the book is sui generis, and contains multiple digressions in the plot that make Moby Dick a thoroughly distinct work. Notorious for its difficulty, and infamous for its many chapter's describing the mechanics and history of whaling, Melville's book is now regarded as a classic par excellence.What are we to make of this book? It is one of the strangest that I've ever encountered, and I reckon myself pretty well versed in strange books. For one, this is the most overt effort to write a 'classic' that I've come across. Melville knows what he's going for, and he self-conciously pulls out every trick in his bag. The book is firmly grounded in the Western canon, making references to Shakespeare, Locke, Milton, Kant, Plato, the Bible, Goethe, and Coleridge, among others. It is also meticulously researched, with virtually whole bibliographies on whaling and whale-stories contained within. It seems that Melville's White Whale was greatness, and he pursued it with a madman's ire, lashing out at it with every harpoon in his armory. In fact, Moby Dick was not well-received during his lifetime, and so perhaps Melville even shared in Ahab's fate.In the book, Ishmael uses everything on board the ship to serve as a metaphor for something else, until, in the end, the ship is as riddled with metaphors as with the rigs, ropes, and lines that cross her hull. Meaning is ever-elusive, and one thing can stand for ten others. The best example of this is, obviously, Moby Dick, who can take on almost infinite meanings. Is he nature, punishing the whalers for their slaughter of his kinsmen? Is he Melville's struggle with greatness? With God? Or is Moby Dick simply Fate? Or, is Moby Dick a pre-Freudian psychological device? The object of Ahab's displaced fears, hopes, and anger? Is Moby Dick a phallic symbol (his name is straightforward enough)? A ram-shaped whale, filled with white spermaceti! I hate to be coarse, but the work asks these questions, and a thousand more.Melville also gives us a consummate tragic character, Captain Ahab, who seems to be a composite of nearly every other tragic figure that came before: Achilles, Orestes, King Lear, Hamlet, Faust, and Satan from Paradise Lost. Added to that, Melville blends with Ishmael several times during the narrative, becoming both part of the story as well as the author. He makes no attempt to hide the process of creation, giving Moby Dick a strickingly modernist feel at times.But is Moby Dick a perfect work? Not a soul would argue that. Some chapters on whaling are indeed excessive, Melville's prose, while often brilliant, has a tendency to become labyrinthine and over-precise during his technical explanations. The storyline itself is actually quite short, and is told in the first and last 10% of the book, the middle 80% consisting of a monumentously ambitious literary experiment (some of which he could have spared us). But I regard these flaws as I do the scar that runs the length of Ahab's body: the flaw that makes perfection. The entire work itself becomes some sort of allegory for Ahab's character: monomaniacal, brilliant, flawed, and over-extended. Blast you, Melville, you're a genius after all.

This year, I want to attempt to read some of the old classic material. This was the first of this year, and I'm finally glad I read it. The flow of the story was enjoyable, and I loved the old English conversations between the crew and the writing style. There were times I needed to re-read areas , as we are not used to that style of speech today.Definitely a classic must read. Now, to choose my next classic. I don't know where to begin. I've read Jules V, HP Lovecraft, Shelly's Frankenstein, Poe, and HG wells.AnyI'm open to suggestions?

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, accompanied by King Lear by W. Shakespeare and the Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, was a monthly reading for a book club. Obviously, Moby Dick was the centerpiece of the dining, with its sheer volume compared to the others, and a myriad of topics it unraveled. Chapter 96, the Try-Works was one of the most intense chapters. While describing oil-extraction operation from sperm, Ismael observed that "Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body", which reminded me the "Seven Steps Verse or Quatrain of Seven Steps 七步詩 allegedly ciphered by 曹植, Cao Zhi, i.e., "People burn the beanstalk to boil beans, / The beans in the pot cry out. / We are born of the selfsame root, / Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?" Ismael also ascertained that "the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows (Isaiah 53), ..., and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL.", which followed "But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me... Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of DEATH, came over me." Alas, Ahab should have heeded that.Shakespearean influences can be found everywhere in the book. As can be noted, the Parsee's self-fulfilling prophecies sounded like those weird ones by the witches in Macbeth. Another interesting part of the book was Chapter 54, The Town-Ho's Story, which seemed to be the most absorbing chapter. As a story within a story; or another layer of stories under such stories, probably this chapter may have many twists, tricks, and/or plots for this specific story. That is, I doubted that such an arguably good one happened to become the head of a mutiny, I held that he was meant to be the one who led such mutiny, a rebellious one in his nature. How about the bad guy who happened to trigger the feud led to the mutiny? He probably was a bad one, but it would be absurd to move the whole burden of such mutiny to an insolent one, not onto the desperado.When I told one of my senior friends during mountain tracking last month that I was reading the Moby Dick, he suggested that the book should be read as a good business novel. He observed that the characters could be better understood if we put the characters and situations in the book into a corporate setting or business context. Indeed the book itself is about crews in whaling business - risky, profitable, and overly-exploited -, hence business perspectives underlying in the story. How about the intense politics by and between Ahab and Starbuck? Ahab seemed to be worried about the possibility of a mutiny led by Starbuck should he had gone too far. In Chapter 109, Ahab showed his unexpected self-restraint when he was confronted with Starbuck about how to deal with leaking barrels. At the end of the day, he was just an executive hired by principal owners, i.e. Captain Bildad and Captain Peleg, of the ship. How about Captain Ahab's elite whaling troupe, led by the Parsee? We have seen secret elite groups or standing task forces within large corporations. Even their phone numbers are not listed on the company directory, those groups do jobs directly mandated by the highest executives behind the scene. Having gained confidence after a series of tugs-of-war with Starbuck and his crews, or just out of nervous impatience, Ahab went all out, with Pip as his sidekick. As Ahab seized initiatives, Starbuck yielded to Ahab's authority. Chapter 132 was the most hilarious one: As Ahab exhibited a kind of "When I was young" tirade, or "Latte is Horse..", a pun in Korean, Starbuck just came down to give Ahab flattery: "Oh, my captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!" Although he knew what would come to him and his crew, he just followed his Fate, not stood against her, which is common in failling corporations.