Why Read Moby-Dick

serum as he discloses his most intimate concerns. He frets about his literary reputation: “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals’ ! ” He worries that his book is a meandering “botch” even as he fears that it signals the end of a five-year period of exhilarating intellectual growth: “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.” In a week, he tells Hawthorne, he will go to New York City “to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now,—I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine.” A few paragraphs later, he returns to the subject of his novel: “But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other.”
    Here we see Melville marshaling the courage for one last go-around with the White Whale. Like Ahab, he is about to go into battle, and like Ahab, who spills his soul to Starbuck in “The Symphony,” Melville tells Hawthorne everything. He fears, more than anything else, that this is the end of something; already he can sense that his artistic powers will never again reach this height, and it terrifies him. For three weeks, he has been plowing his land, pounding nails with a hammer, his mind turning over the final encounter with Moby Dick, and the result will be one of the most exciting and intricately choreographed action sequences ever written.

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    Ahab’s Last Stand
    B efore we continue, I need to make something perfectly clear. The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I. He has a crooked jaw, a humped back, and a wiggle-waggle when he’s really moving fast. He is a thing of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone—a creation of the natural world that transcends any fiction. So forget about trying to figure out what the White Whale signifies. As Melville has already shown in chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” in which just about every member of the Pequod ’s crew provides his own interpretation of what is stamped on the gold coin nailed to the mast, in the end a doubloon is just a doubloon. So don’t fall into the Ahab trap of seeing Moby Dick as a stand-in for some paltry human complaint. In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough.
    This is the fundamental reason we continue to read this or any other literary classic. It’s not the dazzling technique of the author; it’s his or her ability to deliver reality on the page.
    Which leads us to yet another blessing provided by Melville’s reengagement with the Essex narrative in the spring of 1851. In Chase’s unforgettable firsthand account, he told of what it was like to be aboard a ship that had become the target of a giant whale’s wrath. With Chase’s words fresh in his memory, Melville launched into a series of scenes that conveyed an unmatched sense of immediacy even as they nimbly gathered together the many strands of the novel’s narrative.
    In chapter 133, “The Chase—First Day,” Melville divides our introduction to Moby Dick into three parts. We first see him from a distance, moving leisurely across the surface of the sea as the Pequod ’s whaleboats, led by Ahab, approach. “As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam.... A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale.... [N]ot Jove, not that great