Rating: 
Summary: Romancing the Whale
Review: It seems unlikely that any modern reader willing to tackle _Moby Dick_ will come to the book not already having heard many theories on what it is "about" (in the same way it is unfortunately nearly impossible for someone to now be surprised by _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_). Of course, the book is about many things, perhaps even all the things academics and critics have said it is, but first and foremost it seems to be about--dare I say--whaling. Melville/Ishmael is simultaneously infatuated with and terrified of whaling, whales, and whalers, and the book offers incredible (in both senses of the word) detail into the endeavor, its target, and its practitioners. If you begin by thinking that the book is just about Ahab and his personal vendetta, or just about the eponymous white whale itself, you'll be confused when both are absent for chapters on end. But the myriad aspects of whaling provide fodder for Melville's--and the reader's own--ruminations on quests, of all sorts, some universal and eternal, e.g., trying to find God(s) and our place in nature, some distinctly national and post-Enlightenment, e.g., how Americans use science and technology in an effort to capture profit and pride. It is easy to see how Ahab's thirst for vengeance against one "wrinkled-brow" whale drives him to ignore the safety and finances of all others involved with the ship (Melville spells it all right out for his readers, actually using the word "monomania" several times), but less glaring is the fact that all these whalers have given up substantial parts of a "normal" life on land. Why? What are they/we seeking, or running from? Immediately upon finishing the book, I realized that it reminded me deeply of another book which I would have never guessed--Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_. Both are Romantic tales of responsibility and revenge amongst creatures. But in each novel, it becomes obscured who is the creation and who is the creator. Frankenstein creates the monster, but the monster also (re)creates Frankenstein: as father, as widower, as monomaniac. God may have made whales, but man made them profitable. As in _Frankenstein_, it nevertheless becomes difficult to tell who is hunting whom, as when in mid flight, a whale may turn itself around and ram a boat. As Melville has the owners of The Pequod remind us early on, there are merchant-sailors, and then there are *whalers*, both defined by what they chase. Melville's language is often wonderful, but his verbose style is sometimes overbearing, giving too much of too little. Most interesting is the author's occasional pre-po-mo revealing of himself, in the middle of his story stepping forward to defend it as true even if not always believable to lubbers. One thing's for sure--it all has made me want to actually see some whales for myself. But only from a ship with a reinforced metal hull.
Rating: 
Summary: I sympathize with Ahab
Review: On one level, "Moby Dick" is a story about a monomaniac who sought to wreak vengeance against the whale that took his leg. However, on a more symbolic level, the book is really about a man who became tired of being pushed around by a supernatural force that would not be retaliated against. Well, as Melville shows us, Ahab wanted to reverse that situation by settling the score. Ahab thus states his position to God while watching a beautiful sunset over a calm ocean (Chapter 37): "I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies, - Take some one of your own size; don't pommel *me*! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but *ye* have run and hidden.....Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me." Those are mighty big words, considering whom Ahab was daring. And if you consider in the first place that Moby Dick bit off Ahab's leg as an act of self-defense, then it would seem that the real bully in this situation was the captain himself. But he had it in his head that Moby Dick was a supernatural agent carrying out God's divine will. So, Ahab's real vendetta was not with the White Whale, but with God. As we find out in the story, this was a battle that he could never come close to winning. If you really think about it though, Ahab really wasn't such a bad guy. After all, he was attempting to champion Man's rights before God and to protest the way Man seemed to suffer from God's unpredictable will, and these are all ideas that we as human beings can identify with. Nevertheless, such a challenge undertaken by Ahab was too much of a burden for him to handle, and in the end it consumed him spiritually. I really thought "Moby Dick" was an outstanding read. It was unsettling at times, especially in describing the practices of a mid-1800's whaling ship, but which made it all the more brilliant for how Melville used this material to fuel his metaphysical exploration. If you decide to read this book, be sure to have a dictionary handy, because Melville exercises the English vocabulary in all its diversified glory.
Rating: 
Summary: Everything You'Ve Ever Wanted To Know (or not) About Whales.
Review: Moby Dick is obviously a rich and complex novel, a hallmark in the American literary canon and an important evolutionary step. That is why I recommend (unlike a previous reviewer) reading this book in an academic setting so that background and context can be elucidated for you. I am not one to wax pedantic, but serious books deserve serious reading. If you want to let loose, pick up Mary Higgins Clark. The book may have something for everyone, though perhaps not for me. Melville was doubtless a pioneer in his bold digressions from such banalities as plot and dramatic buildup to such quirky and informative sections as a detailing the sperm whale's sperm or the individual anatomies of the dozen better known varieties of whale. There is only so much whale I can take. It matters little that the whale himself is perhaps not as important as what he represents or what the human characters see in the whale. Still, there are enough beautiful passages full of poetry, adventure, and vitality to enchant your mind in between the tedious whale biographies. There is indeed enough weirdness in Moby Dick and Shakesperean structure to celebrate the beginnings of serious American writing. What most interested me in Moby Dick was the language, the inaccessible songs, monologues, and various allusions made in the darkness on the ocean waters. So wipe the spermacetti off your face and do a close reading of the text.
Rating: 
Summary: "Call me overrated"
Review: Some novels get the recognition they deserve, some are mysteriously overlooked and others...well, let's just say that the reasons for "Moby Dick" being considered a great work are as difficult to hunt down as the whale itself. The narrative is confused and rambling, often all at sea. Thus we have a first-person narrator (Ishmael) who is somehow able to tell us what Captain Ahab is thinking when alone in his cabin, a harpoon, without a rope attached, which is thrown into the sea and has miraculously reappeared in the next scene, and so on. Whole books could be written, and indeed have been, detailing all the errors in this story. Apologists have contrived elaborate and unconvincing excuses for what is clearly simple carelessness on the author's part. As for the characters, they never quite make sense. If the whale represents Evil and Ahab Good, why is the latter such an unsympathetic person? What are we to make of the livid lightning scar down his side? The book is full of such presumed symbolism but it all remains vague and unfocused. Ahab having a young wife and newborn child also does not fit the man and his motivations. Queequeg, the most interesting character, is abandoned and forgotten by the author near the end. Melville attempts humor but it is embarrassingly weak. Sometimes, as when he discusses the nature of whales and decides they are fish, not mammals, it is hard to know if he is serious or joking. Either way, it would be such a poor joke, who cares? "Moby Dick" has such an iconic place in American literature that anyone with a serious interest in the subject will want to read it. Please do so unprejudiced by the conventional view that this is a masterpiece. Ask yourself honestly; is it really any good?
Rating:
Summary: Not for all
Review: Every child has heard of Moby Dick, everybody knows the story, not everybody will enjoy the real thing. Tremendously interesting then tragically boring, it's not an easy read. How come? Not that many people are interested in eighteenth century whaling, and there's a fair amount of info about it. I always found that just when I really got into it, it dropped me with wordy descriptions of whales. It can be a polarizing read, sometimes causing you to love Melville and sometimes wishing you had a time machine so you could break his typewriter. Read it and decide for yourself. An interesting book to read before this is the nonfiction account of the whaleship Essex, which this book was based on. It's a much quicker read and it will allow you to decide if you want to wander into Melville's world.
Rating:
Summary: "Now the Lord prepared a great fish..."
Review: I first read Moby Dick; or The Whale over thirty years ago and I didn't understand it. I thought I was reading a sea adventure, like Westward Ho! or Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. In fact, it did start out like an adventure story but after twenty chapters or so, things began to get strange. I knew I was in deep water. It was rough, it seemed disjointed, there were lengthy passages that seemed like interruptions to the story, the language was odd and difficult, and often it was just downright bizarre. I plodded through it, some of it I liked, but I believe I was glad when it ended. I knew I was missing something and I understood that it was in me! It wasn't the book; it was manifestly a great book, but I hadn't the knowledge of literature or experience to understand it. I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end... Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair? Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?" Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of symbolism throughout the book
Review: This was one of the best sea stories ever written. It was different than I had expected. I thought it was going to be like the movie with Gregory Peck. The book is different in many ways. First you have to realize when the book was written to really understand it. It was written in the 1850s in the US. I found the book to an indictment of the times and a protest against slavery. You have to remember the characters. All the guys from Nantucket are from every race in the world, look at the three harpooners. There was an Indian, a black and wild South Pacific Island guy.This show about the way that people were treated at the time. What are they all going after but the great white whale in the South. What is the whale but a great beast beating down on all the others. Ahab is my favoriate character who against all odds goes after the great white whale to take from him what the whale has taken from so many others. It is this stuggle against this Madman who tried to get all his crew to work together to slay the beast, but as was the times the evil which was slavery still existed in the US so the whale prevailed. I also like all the details about whaling and how they used every piece of it for something. The funniest part was Keequay coming in from the rain with the poncho that was made from that part of a whale. Before this book I never knew that all these ships carried buoys with them in case of a cataclysm. I recommend this book to everyone and I was glad I was older when I read it because I understood it more.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Give Up!!!
Review: You can finish this book and you'll be glad that you did. You just need to remember two things. One. The book is meant to be funny in the same way post-modern literature is funny. It's absurd. Imagine tatooing the dimensions of a sperm whale on your forearm. The endless digressions are almost a "who's on first?" Two. The whale is God and Melville has a strange relationship with the deity. This will help you understand why Melville wrote at such length about paintings of whales getting it wrong and so forth. You may--I give you permission--skim these passages. But don't give up!
Rating:
Summary: An Allegorical allegory
Review: As a bastion of Western Civilzation (and the "DEEPEST AMERICAN NOVEL"), it's easy to forget what a treat this STORY is! To all modern sailors, whatever your stripe. this is a great history!
While standing some interminable midwatch, you could do much worse than to imbibe this beautifally realized treatise about whaling life, circa 1850! It's much funnier and more profound than we remember! (maybe that's the real reason it's still around) It's GOOD!
Rating:
Summary: Only Good
Review: Herman Mellvile's most reknowned classic, Moby Dick, is not, contrary to popular opinion, the best, or even among the top five novels ever written. I've read the book twice, and though I enjoy it thouroughly, I find it's lack of actual narrative a bit unsettling. In the beggining of the story, when Isthmael has not yet departed, and he meets up with his humble savage companion Queequeg, the novel is very character orientated, giving in depth descriptions of Queequegs odd demeanor, speech, and apprearance. As the story goes on, and Isthmael picks the Pequod, whose tenants Captains Peleg and Bildad are colorful enough, the novel starts going south. Don't get me wrong, the plot is progressed and the story does move along, mostly through a couple of whale hunts and the conversations between different whaling vessels (or gams), but little seems to happen in between, for a long, long time, and even then it is such a small affair that you don't feel vindicated reading through some of the less interesting chapters. Again, its not that I don't like the book. I had hoped that Fedallah would have been more of a character, and even that Stubb would have found himself in confrantation with him. I also relished the chapter in which Starbuck contemplates murdering Ahab, but overall I just can't buy into a book that uses a story meerly as a backdrop after long, and occasionaly boring sections devoted to the history of whaling. The bad omens are interesting, and keep you very detail orientated, fearing to forget any one detail, but the end is, well, very dissapointing, though I won't ruin it, and anticlimatic to say the least. ..."? Perhaps I just don't appreciate the full scope of the novel. Or I don't understand Mellvilles style, but, while I reccomend it as a great peace of American literature, it didn't grow on me.
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