I read this great so-called classic of American literature once in the '50s and twice in the '60s and I just didn't get it. I've now re-read it and, after forty-something years of seasoning and experience, I'm still a dissenter. Moby Dick is like opera or ballet — it's so highly stylized that either you buy into it or you don't, and I don't. To me, Melville is a quite ordinary GrubStreet quill-driver whose every sentence screams at the very top of its lungs, "Look at me, I'm Shakespearean." I resent Melville's attempt to draft using WS as puller.
Ultimately, there's a deep incompatibility of sensibility between me and HM. I'm not a big Romantic guy. Baring the soul isn't enough to keep me happy, certainly not for the length of so elongated and dense a novel. Perhaps for a brief lyric.
I like stories. Moby Dick must have the thinnest plot in the history of 800-page novels. Man hunts whale, man finds whale, and (last ten pages) whale wins.
Charles Reade's formula for the long nineteenth-century novel was "Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait." Melville neglects the first two of these maxims. There's nothing either amusing or pathetic about Moby Dick but I'm here to tell you that Melville totally mastered the "make them wait" part. Totally.
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