“Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale!  thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.”  And very shortly after Moby Dick enters (stage left), he does just that.  In the last few chapters, the Whale appears, eats and departs.  Not, however, without Ishmael, at the height of the first real action scene, inserting a footnote.  C’mon Ishmael, I know you love facts, but we don’t need one when we’re in the middle of a whale fight, alright?  Thanks.  Anyway. Understandably, Ahab gets a little cranky about all this destruction & escape stuff, so he starts ranting megalomania all over the place, shouting at the crew, “Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!” and “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed.  ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.  Fool!”  And basically, the crew is more afraid of him than they are afraid of dying, so nobody gets a mutiny underway. I mean, when a guy starts talking about himself in the third person, watch out, right?  I can’t really bring myself to tell you what happens to Ahab, but it’s kind of a pathetic way for this dude to go after all the head to head battle he’s been longing for with Moby Dick.  It’s like a guy in a gunfight duel who when he turns to shoot, trips on his spurs and cracks his head in the fall before he can either pull the trigger or catch the bullet in his gut.  It’s a really unsatisfying ending; Melville had to be some kind of an incurable pessimist.  However, I did learn a few cool writing tricks from this book. One, you can switch viewpoint characters occasionally if you do it right.  Melville does it using the conventions of drama: soliloquoy & scripts; and he even writes a few chapters with stage directions and dialogue.  That’s weird, but it was really cool in the reading.  Two, if you are writing something serious that may or may not include a bunch of eventually boring facts, you really need to include some hilarious jokes, as Melville does throughout the book.  I will never forget the passage where he talks about the utilitarian skeleton of Jeremy Bentham.  Comedy gold for lit/history nerds.  Last, use as much poetry as possible, and the devices of poetry even if you hate poetry itself.  The line between all of the written disciplines can be as blurry as you want to make it, and the more times you cross back & forth, the longer your book can be.  At 135 chapters plus epilogue, this book proves it.

Ahab won’t talk to anyone who hasn’t. In the sixty-odd chapters I read today, The Pequod has met several billion different ships, all of which had some kind of tale to tell of seeing or not-seeing Moby Dick. Ahab is goal-oriented. He is focused. He completes all intended tasks in the time frame allotted. He’s like…an awesome bank manager. So you know how Shakespeare almost always has some kind of female witch or crazy woman spouting prophecies of doom? Moby Dick has that too, except they’re always dudes. We heard about the prophecy given to Ahab when he was young: his fate will be similar to that of the king famed in the Bible, whose blood was licked up by dogs when he was punished by God for his defiance. We heard the crazy dude before Ishmael & Queequeg sailed on the Pequod going on and on about how Ahab was going to be the doom of his crew. There’s this crazy tel-evangelist (sans tv) on the Jeroboam telling Ahab that he won’t accept the letter for the deceased Macey, prophesying “Keep it yourself, you’re going that way soon.” The last premonition is from Fedallah the stowaway, who tells Ahab that he will die after he has seen 2 hearses and he’ll be killed with a rope.  I am a few chapters from the end, so we’ll see how that pans out shortly. It’s worth noting that Ahab, as mysterious and one-dimensional as he was in the beginning, is now kind of interesting. We’ve met Pip, the child that accidentally gets lost overboard and is rescued after several hours of trauma, of whom Ishmael says, “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul…He saw God’s foot on the treadle of the loom and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates call him mad.  So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought…” The importance of Pip is that Ahab connects with him, the only person on board he ever gets close to. Pip is like the lost soul of Ahab himself. Pip is all spirit and Ahab is all intention, so they belong together like the old Platonic idea of souls separated who must find one another to be complete. Ahab himself admits to having left only a “cindered apple” of a spirit, and he feels rushed on by the winds of fate to his doom. “Call me an empty ship and outward bound!” he yells defiantly at the departure of the celebrating, home-bound ship, the Bachelor. But in Ahab’s defiance there is a feeling of resignation as well. He earlier admits that, “What is best left alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.”  The one other person who Ahab identifies with is the blacksmith who has lost his family, his fortune and his will to rise out of the ashes of his situation. The blacksmith declares, “I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.” And so it is with Ahab. Just when the reader starts to care whether or not Ahab survives, she kind of knows he won’t.

For one, boys who think they are mystics, philosophers and/or poets are odd enough to be interesting.  For two, geeky and/or smart guys are totally awesome.  Besides his (obvious) obsession with whales and whaling, Ishmael is constantly waxing scientific, but never at the expense of his dual obsession with all things philosophy. Exhibits A & B? Read the following quotes without swooning.  I dare you.  ”…rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapour.  And so, through all the thick mist of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.  And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them have intuitions.  Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” And: “Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone, and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.  But from the same point take mankind in mass and for the most part they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.”  Also: boys with tattoos are badass. “The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics.” The only reason he didn’t keep the details down to the inch? “…I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing…” See? Badass.

I have surpassed the halfway mark and my impression is this: Ishmael (or Melville, I can’t decide which) is deliberately prolonging the exposition with his facts and histories and scripts because the only suspense is: which of either Ahab or Moby eats it.  We know our beloved (sigh!) Ishmael makes it alive.  The story of Ahab’s obsession could be told in far fewer pages, but the thing is: the journey’s the thing.  Maybe this book is so long and meandering because the style is supposed to reflect the 3-year whaling voyage. The reader has a sense that all these rabbit trails Ishmael is taking are the things that rattle around the head of a sailor. There’s a feeling of passing time.  This book is hopped up on facts like a Chuck Palahniuk story.  It’s brimming with not strictly necessary information.  We aren’t going quickly from point A to point Z, we do a few backflips here and there and maybe skip around the alphabet pretty frequently.  I mean, Ahab is the character around whom the plot is built, and he’s rarely ever onstage. (That dude is plotting something weird, I’m sure of it.) Melville means to keep Ahab an enigma, perhaps, like all heroes are in some sense. Whenever we see him, it’s to show his growing obsession with Moby Dick, and never to understand it. The last time Ahab was onstage, he was despairing that the awesome huge whale they just offed wasn’t the one he was looking for. Like King Solomon lamenting that there’s nothing new under the sun, Ishmael pontificates: “But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts – while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

So, I’ve got notes on note cards, notes on napkins, notes on oddly shaped scrap paper: my organizational skills are not completely up to par, to say the least.  Also, there’s way too much I wrote down to include here.  Too much awesome. Reading Moby Dick makes me want to 1) go sailing and 2) hunt for whales (with binoculars, not harpoons), neither of which I have ever done.  As for what I am learning from the structure and the writing, Melville uses stories within the story (myths and tales of their encounters with Moby Dick, as narrated by the whalemen), one chapter is a script, and there is a series of chapters which introduce you to the main supporting characters via a soliloquy from each of them.  Melville spends a chapter reporting on news stories of whales who have willfully capsized and terrorized specific ships, and another chapter on the physiology of several types of whales. There’s a chapter in which Ishmael imagines the ire of Ahab at losing his leg and his crew to the white whale, so well that we feel it too.  We understand why Ahab is “gnawed within and sore without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea.”  Moby Dick is introduced as a character almost halfway through the book.  Ishmael then freaks us out with suspense using one sentence: “What the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.”  Then he resolves some of our suspense by revealing his terror at the idea of this specific whale by outlining all of the “sweet, and honourable and sublime” associations with the color white – then dashing them with all the terrible “transcendent horrors” of vicious polar bears, albinos and corpses.  ”Ah, God!” he concludes, “what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.”  Ishmael, who earlier admitted that he has “swam through libraries and sailed through oceans”, is on the verge of losing a level of innocence; he’s about to see the blood and violence of the romance he has cultivated around his first whaling trip.

The blending of fact, culture and story is done well in the rising action between chapters 6 and 34 (which is where I am today).  We don’t actually meet Captain Ahab until chapter 16, but we begin to sense him earlier, in a preacher’s sermon on Jonah and the Leviathan, in Ishmael’s misgivings once he and Queequeg reach Nantucket, in the rantings of the random fool they meet about town, in the fact that Ahab is missing from the scene which makes him present in his *refusal* to be present while others discuss his ailments.  Ishmael prepares us with facts about the role of each whaleman, facts about several varieties of whales, and intersperses this with his brief experiences of Captain Ahab’s outbursts and withdrawals.  The text is peppered with Ishmael’s personal philosophies as well, which creates a kind of balance so that the story, even as early in it as I am right now, feels richer than if the pace had been faster (e.g. action scenes) at the expense of the character development.  Here’s the kind of man our charming narrator is.  He ruminates: “For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.  Be sure of this, o young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.”

I’m on chapter five, and already this book has slapstick, philosophy, several hilarious jokes, and a definite slacker ethos.  Call me Ishmael, possibly the best first line I have ever read.