WHY READ MOBY-DICK?

Last month I completed my One Big Book goal of 2026 to read Moby-Dick. I got more pride from finishing the book than I enjoyed reading it. (Read my review here.) Yet, I knew, even as I was reading it, that I was obviously missing something. Why would a book remain on the best-books-of-all-time lists for over 175 years if it didn't have something to say to us today? I turned to Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick? to see if I could find some answers. As I read this short book, published in 2010 I highlighted points he made in the book which helped me think about the classic book differently.

Below are those highlighted points. If Philbrick quoted Melville I used quotation marks and red font color to highlight them.

Ch. 1 The Gospels in this Century

Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America. All the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1776 and a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever contentious march into the future. whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. (5)

A whaling story is "nothing less than the genetic code of America? Moby-Dick speaks to us anew with each new crisis? Well, this chapter sure sets the reader up to learn how Moby-Dick is special.

Ch. 2 Landlessness
“For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." This startling insight was revolutionary in 1851 and is still wickedly fresh to us today, more than 150 years later, as globalization makes encounters with foreign cultures an almost daily occurrence. (13)

You've got to hand it to Melville. He didn't write a story for the conservative puritan ethic so common among the people he lived among in New England. He was very open to embracing men from all over the world, even "cannibals" and possible homosexuals. It seems very 21st century to me, not 19th century.

Ch. 6  The Pequod

The compartmentalization of spiritual and worldly concerns in a temptation in every era. In Melville's day, it was most apparent with the issue of slavery, and Bildad, the Bible-reading Quacker whaleman, illustrated the truth of Frederick Douglass's observation that the most brutal slaveholders were always the most devout. (29)

We are facing the same thing today with the rise of Christian Nationalism. Everytime I hear people who identify with this branch of religion I think they are the most unloving people I have ever heard. They want people to think they are devout yet almost all of their actions are the opposite of what Jesus taught us.

Ch 8 The Anatomy of a Demagogue

In Chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck", Melville shows us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man. (37)

Oh, oh. Melville explains through the crew's adoration of Ahab by we follow demented men like Hitler and Trump? Maybe the book really does speak to us today.

Ch 10 The View from the Masthead

Ishmael of the Bible was Abraham's bastard son, who along with his servant mother, Hagar, was banished from his father's household and forced to wander the desert. Ishmael of Moby-Dick has suffered some grievous unnamed loss and now wanders the waters of the world. (51)

Even though I am a Bible reader, I missed this connection of names. One never does learn what the Ishmael in novel is running from, though. I'd guess I missed a lot of symbolism in the novel. It is such a long book and I didn't spend a lot of time pondering it. 

Ch 10, cont. Ishmael may have his intellectual pretensions, but they evaporate in the face of Ahab's overwhelming charisma. "My oath had been welded with [the rest of the crew's]," Ishmael admits. "A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine." (52)

As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all. "My soul is more than matched," Starbuck laments, "she's overmanned; and by a madman!" (54) 

"Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine," There it is again. Why do ordinary people buy into Trump's megalomaniac need for revenge?  Starbuck, the First Mate on the Pequod, gives us the answer: "My soul is more than matched, and overmanned; and by a madman!"

Ch. 13 A Mighty, Messy Book

Melville's example demonstrated the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Come to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. (61)

I no longer have a copy of Philbrick's book in front of me, so I don't remember how Melville's example demonstrates why a person should wait to read the classics but I'm doing it. I'm an old person reading Moby-Dick for the first time. Not only this classic, but almost all classics I've read as an adult. I do appreciate them more now than I think I would have as a teenager.

Ch. 14 Unflinching Reality

Reading Moby-Dick, we are in the presence of a writer who spent several impressionable years on a whaleship, internalized everything he saw, and seven or so years later, after internalizing Shakespeare, Hawthorne, the Bible, and much more, found the voice and the method that enabled him to broadcast his youthful experiences into the future. And this, ultimately, is where the great, unmatched potency of Moby-Dick, the novel, resides. It comes from an author who not only was there but possessed the capacious and impressionable soul required to appreciate the wonder of what he was seeing. (70)

I thought the same thing as I read the book. Clearly Melville did a ton of research, some of it actually aboard a whaling ship, for this novel. He also immersed himself in Shakespeare and the Bible, and read everything he could find on whales. It really is impressive.

Ch 16 Sharks

The job of government, of civilization, is to keep the shark at bay. All of us are, to a certain degree, capable of wrongdoing. Without some form of government, evil will prevail. Here lies the source of the Founding Fathers' ultimately unforgivable omission. They refused to contain the great ravenging shark of slavery, and more than two generations later their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were about to suffer the consequences. (78)

The example of slavery in comparison to sharks is very striking. Melville never spoke for or against slavery but he didn't call the young Black boy on the Pequod a slave, which is noteworthy.

Ch. 21 So Remorseless a Havoc

In chapter 105, Melville tackles a prescient question given today's extinction-prone Earth: "whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must ..., like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff." In the paragraphs that follow, Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in the American West and acknowledges that given what has happened to those "humped herds", it might seem inevitable that "the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction." (93)

Golly, Moby-Dick really does address crises of today: extinction or near extinction of particular animals.

Ch. 23 Pulling Dictatorship Out of a Hat

As the final showdown approaches, we have become so scorched and crushed and otherwise slapped by Ahab in his magnificent emergence as an evil superhero that it becomes increasingly difficult to care. But that is precisely the point. (100)

I've felt that way. Trump does or says some horrible thing every day. It is hard to pay attention and to care anymore.

Ch. 24 Essex Redux

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whistling in his ear. (106)

Ahab listened to his spiritual advisor/fortune-teller, Fedallah. Trump listens to his minions (there are so many!) like Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, and Fox News.

Ch. 26 Ahab's Last Stand

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. (111)

Ch. 28 Neither Believer nor Infidel

Once free of its own historical moment, Moby-Dick became the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today. (125)

Ch. 28 cont. This redemption mixture of skepticism and hope, the genial stoicism in the face of a short ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick. (128) 

It's hard to believe but Philbrick has turned me into a Moby-Dick fan because he has shown me how much of the story I can relate to my reality today.

I just wish I'd read Why Read Moby-Dick? before I actually read Moby-Dick. I think it would have helped me find where I fit into the story better.

-Anne