>>24836543
No American has ever written anything worth reading.

>>24836543
It is just dull. People's glowing reviews reveal they are basically people watching.
>Oh wow it was so sweet when X acted differently after Y!
Yawn! You may as well watch reality TV.

>>24836543
>It drones on about the (sometimes wrong, i.e. whales are fish) details of whaling
Nearly all whale details are connected to some symbolism or narrated in mythological terms. The "whale is a fish" is said in jest. Ishmael starts off by saying all the scientific facts pointing to the whale being a mammal, only to say "call upon holy Jonah to back me".

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

>characters like Queequeg and Fedallah seem to be set up and then forgotten
Once they served their symbolic purpose, they were discarded. Pip and Bulkington are the most important characters in the book after Ahab and Ishmael, despite their short appearance.
>and the narrator Ishmael fades from 1st person into 3rd person.
That's intended.

>>24836551
I wonder what it's like to live in the third world and spend every waking second thinking about America. Must be a miserable existence.

>>24836562
>>and the narrator Ishmael fades from 1st person into 3rd person.
>That's intended.
please elaborate

>>24836570
I usually think about gay sex

>>24836571
I see it as either Ishmael dissociating himself from the traumatic experience the closer they get to the destruction of Pequod and its crew, if you take Moby-Dick to be Ishmael to be an unreliable narrator embellishing the tale, trying to give special Significance and Meaning to what is in essence a base, meaningless and avoidable human tragedy. I think he even says at some point that he's playing up some Ahab speeches, and he had no way of knowing what was going on inside Ahab's cabin during mealtime.
It could also be him losing himself in Ahab's magnetic power. Note that he basically disappears after the chapter where Ahab convinces the crew to take part in his mad hunt.
There's a variety of ways you can read this. I take the Spouter-Inn picture description to be very characteristic of the novel itself: it can be read in many, many different ways:
>On one side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.
>But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
>[...] a final theory of my own: [...] the picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

>>24836562
>Nearly all whale details are connected to some symbolism or narrated in mythological terms
To add, among the references to whales in the opening is a quotation from Hobbes, talking about the "leviathan," i.e., the state. I don't think Melville misunderstood that Hobbes wasn't taking about whales, he's being michevious sometimes with his allusions, such as a later reference to a "Platonian leviathan."

>>24836591
There's a lot of humour in the book once you know what to look for. I think only Thomas Mann is better than Melville at hiding humour in seemingly dignified/grandiose language.

>i don't get it, won't somebody help me
gtfo
sage in all fields

>>24836586
>I see it as either Ishmael dissociating himself from the traumatic experience the closer they get to the destruction of Pequod and its crew
I like that thought

>>24836605
wym help. I just wanna discuss the book