Herman Melville
Moby Dick

Moby Dick is the quintessential American novel, a milestone that has inspired great writers like Faulkner and McCarthy, a literary monster that any passionate reader must eventually reckon with.

Why write a review of Herman Melville's masterpiece? What else can one add that hasn't already been said about a work of such stature without sounding trivial?

It is not my intention to describe the plot that surely all of you know, nor to review Moby Dick... what arrogance to review Moby Dick!

Rather, my aim is to describe two or three aspects of this wonderful book that particularly struck me.

As we venture into Melville's masterpiece, we encounter stories and themes that intertwine, and I think each of us can find many points for reflection since the author's writing is so rich.

The first concerns the encyclopedic nature of this narrative; it is indeed a true treatise on cetology, Melville knows the subject and for many chapters delves into it with painstaking scientific descriptions, explaining in detail every physical characteristic of the sperm whale.

For hundreds of pages, one gets the impression of studying a textbook for a naval academy rather than a work of fiction.

Another aspect that may emerge is the biblical vision and erudition offered by Ismael, our omniscient narrator, who, being the sole survivor of the disaster that befell the whaling ship Pequod sunk by Moby Dick, takes it upon himself to recount the events with a lofty and nuanced style reminiscent of the Sacred Texts.

But it is for the character of Captain Ahab that I honestly loved this work immensely. Delving into the depths of Ahab's mind is stimulating because we come to know one of the greatest antiheroes in all of world literature. A true genius of evil, a mind obsessed with a single goal: to take revenge on the White Whale, to avenge the leviathan that maimed him physically by causing him to lose a leg and that tore apart his soul by making him taste the bitter flavor of defeat for the first time.

This sort of Don Quixote of the Darkness possesses an inner richness and a disproportionate ego much like Cervantes' hero, a vivid imagination that distorts real life and leads to the ruin of his entire ship's crew.

While Don Quixote, the epitome of a candid character, involves the peasant Sancho in improbable adventures to right wrongs done to defenseless maidens, Ahab convinces his sailors in an instant to follow him in what is a foregone suicide mission.

I don't think we should completely believe what Melville writes about the captain's conviction of prevailing over Moby Dick; he is too cultured, too ingenious, not to understand that the White Whale is invincible.

I am convinced that the novel's charm lies in this ambiguity: Melville doesn't say it outright, but his character knows he is heading towards certain death, he knows that the Whale cannot be defeated because it is the sum of everything that is and will remain unknowable to man; its ghostly whiteness represents death itself; Moby Dick was and will be the undisputed king of every sea, and there is no hope for anyone who gets in its way.

Ahab is such a compelling character that he has even influenced other arts; think, for example, of Aguirre played by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's film.

The protagonist of the movie does not possess the inner richness of the captain of the Pequod; he is certainly more petty and uncultured, but he too has an enormous ego and his ambition will lead to his ruin and that of his crew in the mad descent of the river in the quest for El Dorado.

If Ahab is Aguirre, Moby Dick is the River. Moby Dick is not a "pleasant" book, its exotic setting can be misleading, its continuous references to the Bible make a full understanding of the text difficult, and frankly, I think I have only partially enjoyed the multiple nuances of Melville's writing. The advice I can give is to read it with a dictionary at hand because certain maritime terms are truly specific and very frequent.

In short, sometimes it may seem a chore, but some chapters are breathtakingly beautiful. Read, for example, "The Candles" and "Symphony" and you will find yourself in a separate cosmos, probing the abyss of human madness in the company of a character obsessed with the most hidden ghosts, which perhaps, at least in part, belong to us as well.