Why Read Moby-Dick?

Recently, I was relaying to a friend that I am rereading Moby-Dick, and my friend said Moby-Dick was his father's favorite book. "But I've never read it," my friend said. "Too big a reputation."

Indeed, the reputation of the book overshadows the book itself. The very notion of a great book, especially one regarded as the great American novel (Moby-Dick is), is likely to scare away readers. A shame, because good books, not only great ones, ought to be enjoyed.

Moby-Dick is a pleasure to read. A passive narrator, writing under an assumed name, recounts a whaling voyage he took in which the ship and crew were lost to sea on account of a Great White Whale. And were it not for the monomaniacal pursuit of the Whale by the captain, a Quaker named Ahab who lost his leg to the selfsame whale, then the crew might not have perished.

As for the reading experience, the delight is in the details. The book is largely written as though you're engaged in a conversation with a talkative sailor who wants to let you know exactly what whaling is like. He wants to tell you everything he knows about whales, the true accounts and legends alike.

Truth told, in the initial stages of composition, Herman Melville had written a typical novel about whaling. It was not until Melville met and became friends with fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne that he reconceived the book. That was when he introduced the character of Captain Ahab, who planned to stop at nothing until he killed Moby-Dick, the whale who took his leg. That was when the novel took on a mission all its own.

Ahab in his monomaniacal pursuit of the Whale mirrors Melville's own obsessiveness, in writing about the experience of whaling as well as in the relentless crafting of the tale itself. Melville said of the eventual product, his novel, "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

The text is sprawling, there are many moments of idleness and mere description, the form always shifting however Melville needs it to to tell the tale, but you as a reader will want to hear that tale, because it is well-told.