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I just finished reading Moby Dick for a literature class I'm taking this coming semester. The teacher emailed us and recommended we read the book over the summer so we had less to do over the school year, and that is what I did. I read all several hundred pages of it over a three-month period, breaking it up methodically into so many pages per day.
Let me just say, Moby Dick is a weird book. It starts out really promising -- interesting premise, great characters and character interactions. But as soon as they embark on the sea, it gets really weird.
First, you never actually hear anything about the story of the narrator. He starts out a really obvious presence, but as soon as they embark on the voyage he just becomes a silent narrator, with little to no meaningful experiences of his own. Second, he has a fascinating friendship with a native islander on the ship, and that relationship is hardly ever explored at all once they embark on the open sea. Melville just spends a hundred pages on the narrator and his friend and then hardly ever mentions them again. Even when everyone else on the ship dies, the narrator's feelings are never discussed. The book just ends clinically.
So what does Melville spend almost a thousand pages on, if it isn't characters and character interactions? Well, when he's not talking about whale-related struggles, he devotes about two thirds of the book to marine biology and trivial little facts about whaling ships. I mean, granted, a little bit of explanation is necessary in order for the story to make sense. But this goes way beyond that. Jesus Christ, if I wanted a fucking biology lesson, I'd have bought a book on marine biology.
Maybe one could argue that he wanted to intimate to us the vastness of the enterprise. But even if you take this into consideration, he's way too wordy. I could summarize twenty pages in three sentences: "Whales are really big. They used to be smaller. The ocean is intimidatingly vast, but pretty." Granted, if he only wrote those three sentences it wouldn't be a very good book. But you see what I mean. He could have used way less words and explanations to say the exact same fucking thing.
I feel like if about two-thirds of the book were cut out, it would have been a lot better. He could have cut away so much plot-less explanation and the book would not have been the worse for it at all. Even without some meaningful character interaction, the plot of the struggle with the whale(s) is interesting enough to have made for a pretty fair book. But he just goes on all these weird asides. He'll spend like two pages describing a lamp on the fucking ship. Why do we even need that?
Melville's editor failed him. All that shit should have been cut out. And if it wasn't cut out, the author needed to make us care about the extraneous shit. He did not do that.
Not that I have a strong opinion on the book, or anything. Of course, this is coming from me, the girl who managed to fit the plot of an entire book into a 21-page novella.
Let me just say, Moby Dick is a weird book. It starts out really promising -- interesting premise, great characters and character interactions. But as soon as they embark on the sea, it gets really weird.
First, you never actually hear anything about the story of the narrator. He starts out a really obvious presence, but as soon as they embark on the voyage he just becomes a silent narrator, with little to no meaningful experiences of his own. Second, he has a fascinating friendship with a native islander on the ship, and that relationship is hardly ever explored at all once they embark on the open sea. Melville just spends a hundred pages on the narrator and his friend and then hardly ever mentions them again. Even when everyone else on the ship dies, the narrator's feelings are never discussed. The book just ends clinically.
So what does Melville spend almost a thousand pages on, if it isn't characters and character interactions? Well, when he's not talking about whale-related struggles, he devotes about two thirds of the book to marine biology and trivial little facts about whaling ships. I mean, granted, a little bit of explanation is necessary in order for the story to make sense. But this goes way beyond that. Jesus Christ, if I wanted a fucking biology lesson, I'd have bought a book on marine biology.
Maybe one could argue that he wanted to intimate to us the vastness of the enterprise. But even if you take this into consideration, he's way too wordy. I could summarize twenty pages in three sentences: "Whales are really big. They used to be smaller. The ocean is intimidatingly vast, but pretty." Granted, if he only wrote those three sentences it wouldn't be a very good book. But you see what I mean. He could have used way less words and explanations to say the exact same fucking thing.
I feel like if about two-thirds of the book were cut out, it would have been a lot better. He could have cut away so much plot-less explanation and the book would not have been the worse for it at all. Even without some meaningful character interaction, the plot of the struggle with the whale(s) is interesting enough to have made for a pretty fair book. But he just goes on all these weird asides. He'll spend like two pages describing a lamp on the fucking ship. Why do we even need that?
Melville's editor failed him. All that shit should have been cut out. And if it wasn't cut out, the author needed to make us care about the extraneous shit. He did not do that.
Not that I have a strong opinion on the book, or anything. Of course, this is coming from me, the girl who managed to fit the plot of an entire book into a 21-page novella.
