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A review by b_fru
Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville
adventurous
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
There's an adventure tale at the heart of Moby Dick, but it can be hard to see sometimes because it is draped in lengthy theatrical monologues, essays on whales and the whaling industry, and transcendentalist reflections on the veil between the perceptible and the invisible worlds.
This was my second time through the book, the first being 20 years ago. It's a ponderous, dense book that frequently departs from any narrative to consider matters relating to but not necessarily directly impacting events. It's the kind of book that feels momentous while you're reading it, that has a gravitational pull, that's immersive, such that you start slowing down as you near the end because you're not sure what will happen when the gravity finally lets go.
Early on the narrator himself makes clear the White Whale is more than an animal. He's a metaphor, yes, but he's also a force of nature, a writhing and diving meeting of the physical and spiritual — at least for Ahab and his crew. This makes Moby Dick perhaps the most Gothic of Gothic novels, because though it has no medieval trappings or, significantly, any real concern with lineage and the inheritance of the past, it is almost absolutely pure in pitting the human against the inhuman, the Cartesian thinking being against an unthinking world that may, one fears, be at last inhospitable to us.
This was my second time through the book, the first being 20 years ago. It's a ponderous, dense book that frequently departs from any narrative to consider matters relating to but not necessarily directly impacting events. It's the kind of book that feels momentous while you're reading it, that has a gravitational pull, that's immersive, such that you start slowing down as you near the end because you're not sure what will happen when the gravity finally lets go.
Early on the narrator himself makes clear the White Whale is more than an animal. He's a metaphor, yes, but he's also a force of nature, a writhing and diving meeting of the physical and spiritual — at least for Ahab and his crew. This makes Moby Dick perhaps the most Gothic of Gothic novels, because though it has no medieval trappings or, significantly, any real concern with lineage and the inheritance of the past, it is almost absolutely pure in pitting the human against the inhuman, the Cartesian thinking being against an unthinking world that may, one fears, be at last inhospitable to us.