is it the great american novel?
This is the Dark Souls of novels.Not because of its difficulty.But because the author can just ramble nonsense on the pages and people will go crazy over it making thoeries and stuff
>>25207731Moby Dick exists, dimwit.
>>25207731Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom and Mason & Dixon all have a better claim to the title IMO
>>25207750>mason & dixonLMAO. As if any pynchud is even in the conversation
>>25207731No, Lord of the Rings is
>>25207731Nope, Mason & Dixon
>>25208216Lol
>>25207739what are you talking about brother
>>25207750>>25208216>M&D over GRlel
>>25207731It's no Billy and the Cloneasaurus
>>25208722>thinking either of them belongLel
>>25207731That would be Moby Dick or The Sound and the Fury.
>>25208846Is Moby dick really that good? I read a short story by him and wasn't impressed and from what I've heard MD is pretty boring
>>25208869[The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.]I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
>>25207731No. Still Moby Dick.
>>25207731Honestly, I think maybe so.>>25208846I refuse to believe large numbers of people actually read and enjoyed The Sound and the Fury.
>>25209693>read Yes.>enjoyedBenjy and Jason chapters are awful. Awful on purpose, but they still feel like shit to read, and I feel like that prevents the book from being the GAN.
>>25207731>Moby Dick>The Sound and the Fury>Absalom, Absalom>Blood Meridian
How does it rank?
>>25208882That night they camped on a ledge of rock above the plains and watched the lightning all along the horizon provoke from the seamless dark the distant mountain ranges again and again. Crossing the plain the next morning they came upon standing water in the bajadas and they watered the horses and drank rainwater from the rocks and they climbed steadily into the deepening cool of the mountains until in the evening of that day from the crest of the cordilleras they saw below them the country of which they’d been told. The grasslands lay in a deep violet haze and to the west thin flights of waterfowl were moving north before the sunset in the deep red galleries under the cloudbanks like schoolfish in a burning sea and on the foreland plain they saw vaqueros driving cattle before them through a gauze of golden dust.They made camp on the south slope of the mountain and spread their blankets in the dry dirt under an overhanging ledge of rock. Rawlins took horse and rope and dragged up before their camp an entire dead tree and they built a great bonfire against the cold. Out on the plain in the shoreless night they could see like a reflection of their own fire in a dark lake the fire of the vaqueros five miles away. It rained in the night and the rain hissed in the fire and the horses came in out of the darkness and stood with their red eyes shifting and blinking and in the morning it was cold and gray and the sun a long time coming.By noon they were on the plain riding through grass of a kind they’d not seen before. The path of the driven cattle lay through the grass like a place where water had run and by midafternoon they could see the herd before them moving west and within an hour they’d caught them up.They drove the cattle on to the west fording creeks and a small river and driving pockets of antelope and whitetail deer before them out of the stands of enormous cottonwoods through which they passed. There was a road on the other side of the fence and in the road were the tracks of tires and the tracks of horses from the recent rains and a young girl came riding down the road and passed them and they ceased talking. She wore english riding boots and jodhpurs and a blue twill hacking jacket and she carried a ridingcrop and the horse she rode was a black Arabian saddlehorse. She’d been riding the horse in the river or in the ciénagas because the horse was wet to its belly and the leather fenders of the saddle were dark at their lower edges and her boots as well. She wore a flatcrowned hat of black felt with a wide brim and her black hair was loose under it and fell halfway to her waist and as she rode past she turned and smiled and touched the brim of the hat with her crop and the vaqueros touched their hatbrims one by one down to the last of those who’d pretended not even to see her as she passed. Then she pushed the horse into a gaited rack and disappeared down the road.
>>25207731peak preddit
Gray sky, gray land. All day he slouched north on the wet and slouching horse through the sandy muck of the upcountry roads. The rain went harrying over the road before him in the gusts of wind and rattled over his slicker and the hooftracks oozed shut behind him. In the evening he heard again the cranes overhead, passing high above the overcast, balancing beneath them the bight of the earth’s curve, earth’s weather. Their metal eyes grooved to the pathways which God has chosen for them to follow. Their hearts in flood.He rode into the town of San Buenaventura in the evening and he rode through pools of standing water past the alameda with its whitepainted treetrunks and the old white church and out along the old road to Gallego. The rain had stopped and rain dripped from the alameda trees and dripped from the high canales in the mudwalled houses he passed. The road led up through the low hills to the east of the town and set in a bench of land there a mile or so above the town lay the cemetery.He turned off and slogged out along the muddy lane and halted his horse before the wooden gates. The cemetery was a large and wild enclosure set in a field filled with loose stones and brambles and surrounded by a low mud wall already then in ruins. He halted and looked out over this desolation. He turned and looked back at the packhorse and he looked at the gray scud of clouds and at the evening light failing in the west. A wind was blowing down from the gap in the mountains and he stepped down and dropped the reins and passed through the gate and started out across the rough cobbled field. A raven flew up out of the bracken and parried away on the wind croaking thinly. The red sandstone dolmens that stood upright among the low tablets and crosses on that wild heath looked like the distant ruins of some classic enclave ringed about by the blue mountains, the closer hills.Most of the graves were no more than cairns of rock without marker of any kind. Some held a simple wooden cross composed of two slats nailed together or twisted together with wire. The cobbled rocks everywhere underfoot were the scattered remains of these cairns and ignoring the red stone steles this place looked the burial of some aftermath of battle. Other than the wind in the wild rough grass there was no sound at all. He walked out along a narrow and uncertain footpath winding among the graves, among the slabs and sepulchre tablets blacked over with lichen. In the middle distance a red stone pillar in the shape of a pollarded treetrunk.His brother was buried against the southmost wall under a board cross in which had been burned with a hot nail the words Fall el 24 de febrero 1943 sus hermanos en armas dedican este recuerdo D E P. A ring of rusted wire that once had been a wreath leaned against the board. There was no name.
>>25210355It was dark when he rode back into Buenaventura. He dismounted before the church door and walked in and took off his hat. At the altar a few small candles burned and in that half fugitive light knelt a solitary figure bent at prayer. He walked up the aisle. There were loose tiles in the floor that rocked and clicked under his boots. He bent and touched the kneeling figure on the arm.She raised her head, a dark seamed face faintly visible in the darker folds of her rebozo.He knew her well enough, this old woman of Mexico, her sons long dead in that blood and violence which her prayers and her prostrations seemed powerless to appease. Her frail form was a constant in that land, her silent anguishings. Beyond the church walls the night harbored a millennial dread panoplied in feathers and the scales of royal fish and if it yet fed upon the children still who could say what worse wastes of war and torment and despair the old woman’s constancy might not have stayed, what direr histories yet against which could be counted at last nothing more than her small figure bent and mumbling, her crone’s hands clutching her beads of fruitseed. Unmoving, austere, implacable. Before just such a God.When he rode out the next morning early the rain had stopped but the day had not cleared and the landscape lay gray under a gray sky. To the south the raw peaks of the Sierra del Nido loomed out of the clouds and closed away again. He dismounted at the wooden gate and hobbled the packhorse and untied the spade and mounted up again and rode out down the footpath among the cobbled rocks with the spade over his shoulder.
They rode out through the last of the small colonias south of the town. In the fields they passed there were men and women picking cotton among the gray and brittle plants. They watered the horses at a roadside acequia and loosed the latigos to let them blow. Across the pieced land they watched a man turning the earth with an ox yoked by its horns to a singlehanded plow. The plow was of a type that was old in Egypt and was little more than a treeroot. They mounted up and rode on. He looked back at Boyd. Thin atop the unfurnished horse. Thinner yet in shadow. The tall dark horse that trod the road with its great angular articulations arch and slanting in the dust more true of horse than horse he rode. Late in the day from the crest of a rise in the road they halted the horses and looked out over the broken plats of dark ground below them where the sluicegates had been opened into the newplowed fields and where the water standing in the furrows shone in the evening light like grids of burnished barmetal stretching away in the distance. As if the boundary gates to some ancient enterprise lay fallen there beyond the ditchside cottonwoods, the evening’s singing birds.By and by they overtook on the darkening road a young girl walking barefoot and carrying upon her head a cloth bundle that hung to either side like a great soft hat. So that as they clopped slowly past she was obliged to turn her whole body sideways to see them. They nodded and Billy wished her a good evening and she wished them one back and they rode on. A little farther and they came to a place where the overflow from the acequias had left water standing in the bar ditch and they dismounted and led the horses along the bank and sat in the grass and watched geese walk stiffly about on the darkening fields. The girl passed along the road. They thought at first that she was singing softly to herself but she was crying. When she saw the horses she stopped. The horses raised their heads and looked toward the road. She went on and they lowered their heads and drank again. When they led the horses back up into the road she was very small and almost motionless in the distance before them. They mounted up and set out and after a while they overtook her once again.
>>25208869People like you are why I threaten nearly every day to leave this shithole site. Moby Dick is nothing short of a miracle. Idiots like you don't understand it's not the plot or the characters that make a great book. It's the theme. It's the digestion. It's the seriousness.Moby Dick is Shakespearian (no, I won't explain what this actually means). It is Paradise Lost (no, I won't explain what this actually means). It is biblical (this one is pretty plain from the text desu he goes on about the bible A LOT).You are not worth my time. Maybe you should read Flashman, it might be more your speed.
>>25210403>ShakespearianIs that someone from Armenia?
>>25210403Pasta?
>>25210403Flashman's great, love it.
