Moby Dick--Way Better than I Expected

I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne about seven years ago and hated every page of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter_%28TV_miniseries%29

 It was the driest book I had ever read; so boring and painful that at the end all I wanted to do was throw it away. But I couldn't because I needed it to study for the upcoming test in my high school English class.

I figured that Moby Dick would be the same for me. It's a classic--a very famous classic--but all I'd ever heard about it is that it's boring, hard to get through, and really, just a large waste of paper. Despite a little bit of excitement to read it (really just for bragging rights of finishing this colossal book), I didn't have much hope for enjoying it. I figured my reaction towards it would be the same as The Scarlet Letter: slogging through it, hoping the next page would have a point, get back to the story, be a little less flowery, or even just be the last page so that I could set it aside and never look at it again. Compound this with the fact that Melville dedicated the Moby Dick to Hawthorne, and you can see why my expectations were so very low.

I guessed I'd look like this most of the time while reading Moby Dick.

It's been nothing like that though. From the first page I have been hooked. And I'm not even remotely interested in whaling, or sailing, or the ocean . It's the characters of Ishmael and Queequeg, and Herman Melville's deceptively simple writing style that has pulled me in so much. I'm always left wanting more.


I am especially enjoy the parts with Queequeg. Whenever I see his name in the chapter, I get a little excited feeling in my chest and all I can think is, "This is going to be good."

I particularly loved the story of Queequeg and Ishmael's first meeting in the same bed, particularly Queequeg's initial alarm and then good-natured invitation for Ishmael to join him once the landlord smoothed things over. Queequeg's character is fascinating too what with his pagan rituals, aloof disposition yet friendly personality, and thirst for knowledge and understanding of those around him. He is deeply religious, extraordinarily clever, and very loyal to himself. Queequeg stands up for what he believes, even if he cannot use many words to do so (e.g. picking up, throwing, and then saving the country bumpkin).

However, I wonder too if I would find these parts with Queequeg so interesting if I came from a background more like Queequeg's and less like Ishmael's. Perhaps I would find Ishmael to be the interesting one, and Queequeg the average one. Kind of a deep thought...

Melville has many of these deeper moments interwoven into his simple writing style, and that's another reason why I find myself loving the book. While these deeper moments are what causes the book's plot to move at a famously slow pace,  they are also what makes the book so fascinating and more than just another whaling story. Furthermore, Melville gets these deeper points through to his readers quickly and painlessly, unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This isn't how I imagined the pulpit in the book, but it's a neat picture all the same.

For example, Melville explores not only death, but grieving in the chapter entitled "The Pulpit" which is no more than two pages long. "Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass," he writes, "who standing among flowers can say--here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these." He gets his point across in a mere paragraph and then expounds on that point for just a little more than a page, all the while staying on task with the book's plot and life explorations. Exploring and staying on task at the same time is hard to do and I commend Melville for it.

Perhaps I am being unfair to Hawthorne. I read his book seven years ago as a junior in high school and it is entirely possible that I was not ready for the deeper symbolism his book contained. If I were to go back and reread it today, perhaps I would enjoy it just as much as I am enjoying Moby Dick.

I don't have plans to reread The Scarlet Letter any time soon though, and so therefore I'll leave it in peace for now, and end with saying that Moby Dick is brilliant and what's more it is enjoyable. There are still several hundred pages to go before I reach the end of the book, so maybe I'll soon discover where its reputation of being boring comes from, but until then I'm going to enjoy Moby Dick and its plot and subplots for as long as I can.