Moby Dick isn’t Boring. You Just Didn’t Get It.
Today, determined to find something to distract me at the agency, I decided to see what my fellow Medium writers were saying about my favorite book, Moby Dick. To my dismay, what I found was a lot of people complaining about how they tried to read it, but couldn’t get past the “boring” chapters — the chapters that examine the whaling industry, the anatomy of the whale, the different depictions of whales throughout history, and so on. One commenter groaned about how it was “a great story, except for all the chapters about whaling.” A few people even suggested reading an abridged version (I know… the horror).
Here’s my message to anyone who has suggested that Moby Dick would have somehow been better without those “boring chapters”:
Shut up and go read something else.
Those “boring chapters” are the whole point of the book. Moby Dick isn’t an action story, or an adventure thriller — well, it is, but that’s not what makes it one of the most important pieces of literature in the English language. It’s a strange, experimental, and heretical treatise on the relationship between God, nature, and mankind — and nowhere is that more evident than in the “boring chapters.”
Chapters like “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars”, “The Sperm Whale’s Head — Contrasted View,” and “The Whiteness of The Whale.”
These chapters form the crux of Ishmael’s worldview — that God is everywhere, in everything. That heaven is not in scripture and pulpit, but in the squeezing hands of his fellow sailors; in the amorphous and inscrutable form of the whale’s forehead; in its horrible, meaningless whiteness.
“Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows — a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?”
— Chapter 42, The Whiteness of The Whale
You don’t read Moby Dick for the story. Everyone knows the story, and it’s an absurd plot line anyway: A lunatic whaling captain hunts for one specific whale, and (spoiler warning) nearly everyone is killed in the process. There’s some male bonding and some character development for Ishmael in between, but in terms of action, that’s about it.
You read Moby Dick because it’s the magnum opus of one of the greatest writers this country has ever seen, and because it’s a funny, weird, subversive, cryptic, blasphemous, and beautiful examination of man’s relentless struggle to find (and, in Ahab’s case, to kill) God.
It’s not a book for everyone. It’s weird and long and meandering, and it’s written in a strange and experimental style. It sometimes trades format, suddenly and without warning, from prose to poetry to Shakespearean drama. There are inconsistencies in the point of view, as Ishmael describes events that he was not actually present at, giving the text an almost mythic air. And, of course, Melville makes a point of teaching you everything he knows about the history, anatomy, methodology, and religious implications of the enigmatic whale hunt.
So no, I can’t blame you for not liking it. But to suggest that it’s a flawed book because of some chapters you thought were boring? That’s nonsense.
In the words of D.H. Lawrence, “it is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; it is a book of […] considerable tiresomeness. But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.”
Okay, that’s enough snobbery for one post.
TL;DR: Don’t read Moby Dick if you’re looking for some grab-and-go literary street cred (see: Hemingway, Hesse, Fitzgerald, etc). Do read if you’re looking for “one of strangest and most wonderful books in the world.”
