Reviews with content warning for Animal death - Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale

Reviews tagging 'Animal death'

Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville

79 reviews

krobbolo05's review against another edition

4.75

adventurous challenging funny informative medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Cool Whale lessons thanks Ishmael

Content Warnings

leighannh2's review

2.0

adventurous challenging mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Just not for me

Content Warnings

barnswallow8's review

4.0

adventurous challenging dark funny informative mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

mooseinlowlight's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous funny lighthearted tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I hope Hootkins got some type of award for the reading of this book. He was very fun and engaging.

I liked this book tho all the tangents meant I had a very low chance at knowing what was actually happening at any given moment 😂

Content Warnings

narzibenoucdel's review against another edition

2.75

adventurous informative slow-paced

This is a tedious and excessively verbose book with some genuinely good writing and interesting construction beneath all of it, but it is challenging to get past its downsides. As you might expect from a classic from this time period, the racism and Christian-centric thought is prevalent and pretty exhausting. It is interesting and informative to a certain degree if you want to learn a lot about whales, whaling, and a more archaic perception of cetaceans as a whole, but the plot momentum is pretty non-existent and you will be forced to read dozens of inane metaphors about things you don't care about and paltry attempts at Shakespearean dramatics whether you like it or not. I'm glad I read it but I'll be glad to never read it again.

Content Warnings

cajonist's review against another edition

2.5

challenging dark reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Finally it’s done… Three months of reading but it’s over and I can’t say it was exactly worth it.

There’s very little story for the amount of text here. I feel like Brendan Frazer’s teenage daughter when I complain that the whale is only present for 10% of the book but I stand by my grievance. The book would be less than half the size only for the fact that, any time a character picks up a rope, Melville will wax lyrical for 20 pages about how ropes are made, the various uses for ropes, the history of rope, and his favourite type of knot.

At times, the prose is quite impressive. At times, it’s leaden and overwrought. Sometimes, Melville styles the writing like a Shakespearean play. Sometimes, it’s written like a bad science assignment that’s trying to ramble over its lack of content to make the word count.

With an editor, this could be a peerless work of classic literature. That it still makes that grade for all its flaws is a remarkable achievement but the book itself is 60% authorial hubris, 40% magic.

Content Warnings

midnightcomets's review

5.0

emotional informative slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

What a journey...

Content Warnings

ed_moore's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous challenging informative slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

“The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had rolled on five thousand years ago”

In his tome of a novel, or myth of morality, Melville claims that “The whale have no famous author and whaling have no famous chronicler.” In writing ‘Moby Dick’ he certainly succeeded in fulfilling such absence. ‘Moby Dick’ is the story of Ishmael, who boards the ship of Captain Ahab, a one legged sailor in search of vengeance against the creature that tore off his leg, the white whale Moby Dick. Though sprawling in length, it is an incredibly written book. Melville’s levels of detail and descriptions are sublime and the conclusion was breathtaking. The small details scattered through and built up throughout the novel all cumulated and it honestly had the emotional impact of the final pages of a murder mystery.

The protagonist, Ishmael, was the most lacklustre part of the novel. Despite being in his head for over 700 pages he really doesn’t get much development and is quite flat, if the opening line “Call me Ishmael” wasn’t so iconic you would honestly start to forget he existed. However, the flamboyant cast of characters around him on the ship, the mysterious and menacing Ahab, loveable Queequeg and even the phantom-like presence of the cabin-boy Pip make up for this absence in Ishmael.

Most authors do extensive research for their novels, whereas very few decide to include all this research within its pages. If Melville didn’t constantly break the plot up with information on the jurisdiction of whaling laws or the average inches of a male sperm whales jaw bone this book would’ve had so much rhythm to it, and as much as I enjoyed the plot the sheer amount of this filler information (Melville being paid by the word likely being the cause of this) means I can’t let myself give it five stars despite how well Melville’s prose was written. The book does however focus on the hunting and murder of whales which is pretty uncomfortable and the image of the Pequod with a severed whale head hanging from each side was harrowing and will forever haunt me. Though the man did truly have a talent to spin words and never did I think I would learn so much about the whaling industry of the 1800s or whale species in my life, but that is just the consequence of reading ‘Moby Dick’.

For the most part ‘Moby Dick’ was absolutely brilliant and certainly worth the read, though the two overarching flaws of Ishmael and information overload cap it at 4.5 unfortunately.

Content Warnings

giuliamrll's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous informative slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: N/A

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

da_michael's review

3.75

adventurous challenging funny informative inspiring reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I certainly would have dropped the novel during some of the slower scenes aimed at teaching the reader as much as it possibly could about the act of Whaling. However, I’m taking a class on this novel and having the input of 35 or so different voices as points of view has had a major impact on my interpretation and appreciation of the novel. This is the first book since the old Diary of a Wimpy Kid books I’ve read from beginning to end without skipping over and getting summarized for me on the internet. I hope I can bring the same level of analytical thinking I used to tackle this monster of a book with all my future reading and annotation.

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