A vengeful captain baptises three harpoons in the blood of heathens and commissions three coffins. But you’ll read about all this at the very end of the novel. Till then, there’s going to be lots of stuff about whaling.
I read Moby Dick in a very confusing time in my life. Mid twenties and mid 2010s was a confusing time. Millennials in their thousands and millions were joining the workforce. Most of us, with degrees in hand, didn’t get dream jobs. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and the dreams started to get lucid.
Looking out of crowded buses after a heavy nine-to-five, I only saw shades beneath those umbrellas as the heavens emptied into puddles.
I browsed bookstores, looking for any sort of inspiration. “Perhaps this will change my life,” my fingers brushed along neatly racked rows of black-bound Penguin Classics. One day at Makeen, my search ended. There it was, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The cover: a white sperm whale in mortal combat with men on a jolly boat, spears sticking out of its back.
Moby Dick starts much like any other novel of its time – Slow. But it started to get fantastical. We are introduced to a cast of colourful characters. A little United Nations of European Americans and natives from far flung spaces. But does not take you to the confrontation just like that. Aboard the Pequod, Melville slowly gets you acquainted to the world of whaling.
Moby Dick is best described as an encyclopedic novel. This is the reason why readers find this genre so daunting and why many a bookmark stayed on page 52 – unmoved for years. Moby Dick also rested by my bedside for months. But it took a special courage for me to get through in a year. A feat that I still am very proud of, seeing the number of people who had given up reading it.
“Have you read Moby Dick?” I asked a friend. “Yes I did, when I was a kid,” the friend scoffed.
I later figured out that he had read some abridged children’s version with plenty of pictures. No, this is not some watered down kids’ book. Reading airport novels and self-help books is not “reading” at all.
You will never compare American Pie to the Godfather. Best sellers fly off shelves when they are announced. The Dune books? Oh yeah, nobody noticed until Dennis Villeneuve made it into a two-part epic movie.
But what makes Moby Dick so hard to read. Now, after almost ten years, I haven’t the foggiest idea why. All that I can recall was the page turning chase in the end – the best part of the novel, and maybe the part where they kill a whale and extract its oil in the middle of the book.
Ten years on, I read quite a good number of books. I take Chuck Plahniuk’s ‘Adjustment Day’, ‘Damned’ and ‘Survivor’ as personal favourites. Cram into this list a couple of “Great American Novels” such as ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye’. But it’s Moby Dick that still catches my awe. I have caught wind of the next great book I should read – ‘Blood Meridian’ by Cormac McCarthy, a book that promises the same amount of fatalism and dread that ‘Moby Dick’ provides (Replace the Great White Whale with Judge Holden and you will understand).
But the supreme question still stands: “Why Moby Dick?” Personally, Moby Dick echoes with suffering souls. Captain Ahab’s futile quest is, more than anything, a reflection. It offers a salient mediation for a generation caught in endless doom scrolling – an escape; in pages and pages of 19th Century literary struggles. Over a century ago, people scoured the ocean for whale oil and expanded into parts unknown.
This was deemed “progress” but we have come full circle. We still scar the earth to power industries.
Although the whales are now relatively safe from that sort of barbarity, the degree of exploitation had been branched out; it is sophisticated, globalised…
Moby Dick is a deep investigation of both within and without and I hope my account would prompt you to purchase this great book. If you haven’t read it yet, your curiosity will be a rite of passage.
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The ‘Essex’ was a Nantucket whaling ship that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. The crew was left stranded in the Pacific Ocean, leading to a harrowing tale of survival, including cannibalism. This real-life maritime disaster deeply influenced Hermann Melville when he wrote Moby-Dick (1851). Melville read accounts of the tragedy, especially the memoir of First Mate Owen Chase, and was inspired by the idea of a whale turning violent against its hunters. He used the ‘Essex’ as a foundation for his own fictional narrative of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the great white whale.
Coloured lithograph by Cyprien Gaulon – the earliest picture of the Nantucket Whaleship ‘Essex’
