Hard to ignore and not wonder about the meaning of Ishmael's ambiguous sexuality

"I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts" | Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) | Herman Melville

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	• Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Classics) Herman Melville Penguin Classics, 2002 - 720 pages average customer review:based on 321 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hey! You Can't Be Ishmael Again! It's My Turn to Be Ishmael!

Yes, friends, that's how it always went when my cousins and I played Moby Dick on the old farm. There were enough of us to make up a decent cast only on holidays, and there were always a couple of girl cousins who thought they should get to play with us, but since I was the oldest, we did it my way. Being the biggest also, it would have been natural for me to play the White Whale, but I was sensitive about my height and always stuck my humorless cousin Lennart with that voiceless role. And since I was the game narrator, it really WAS my job to be Ishmael, but my closest-in-age cousin Paul was jealous and likely to run to Mormor to complain that I was being bossy. So we rotated the role of Ishmael, on the condition that if anyone lost his place in the unfolding of the adventure, he'd be instantly demoted to playing Stubb or Flask, and I'd assume my destiny as the observed observer, the author of events.

Ishmael is the main character in the novel, you know, the one who sets the pace and calls the tune. It's Ishmael who goes questing; Ahab's quest is just a bright projection of Ishmael's, a particularly fantastic shadow puppet on the wall of Ishmael's cave. It's mostly Ishmael to tells us what Ahab is all about, though betimes Melville lets Ahab rage in his own plenipotent Shakespearean dialect. It's Ishmael who leads us, in the reverse of Dante, to paradisal seas and proper Christian faith first, then to the purgatory of the butchery, and then the depths of hellish annihilation. If I ever had to teach a high school English class - an honor I don't aspire to - I'd tell the little blighters straight off that in any novel with a first-person narrator, that's the chap to watch. Finally, it's Ishmael who LEARNS. In his first encounter with Queequeg, he learns human relativity. Through all the pages and chapters detailing the nature of the whale and of whaling, he learns and learns, and shares his learning in his ever-bemused, ironic style. Of course, he learns eventually that HE is the sole survivor of his own quest. And don't be fooled for a moment that he hasn't learned the metaphysical truth that he set out to learn in the symbolic guise of the White Whale...

Moby Dick is a book about the dread Melville felt at his increasing religious uncertainty, his fear of the infinite, and particularly of an infinite that might well be empty, that might be as void as the color white. He says as much in the key chapter 42, 'The Whiteness of the Whale': "...a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink..."

But Moby Dick is also a rollickingly funny book, ripping anything it touches with its sarcasm and satire. If one chapter seems wordy, dear reader, keep your eyes open and you'll be rewarded by a side-splitter in a few pages. Melville perhaps still wrote under the illusion that he could sell profundity to the parlor readership of Victorian America; a good thing for us, since he gave us full measure of adventure, of humor, and of personal anguish all in one unforgettable book. What each reader notices as she/he reads Moby Dick will be as different as what each hiker sees while descending into the Grand Canyon. I've read it three times now, decades apart; this time, with my own metaphysical quests all logged, I found it more hilarious, more picturesque, more a grand display of virtuosic wordsmithing than I recalled. Anyone who finds Moby Dick boring isn't worth his/her hard tack biscuit.

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Hard to ignore and not wonder about the meaning of Ishmael's ambiguous sexuality

This book has many interesting well-known aspects (e.g., it's indeed long and often boring, or at least prone to digression; but it is also a great American myth that gets better and better as it goes along and peaks in the bravura last 30 pages; and it is heavily and positively inspired by Shakespeare's best work.) Most of these facets are covered in other reviews that you'll read at Amazon and other places. But one aspect that is not really touched on in much detail by other reviewers is how very GAY it is.

I assumed before reading it, that there might be some homoerotic overtones to a book about men who spend a year together out at sea. But what I didn't expect was how much the mythological aspect of this odyssey is tied to the philosophy that men are most fulfilled and find greatest meaning sharing their lives, bodies, and souls exclusively with other men. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But as a heterosexual, I was stuck by how much of the art and psychology of the book seemed to be cryptically but persistently gay-oriented.

By the end of the book, after reading about Ishmael sleeping with and then ritually marrying a fellow whaler (admittedly without any sex explicitly mentioned), and chatting excitedly in the same bed together all night with him; and later seeing how much Ishmael notices and comments on other men's bodies; and culminating in a later chapter that describes Ishmael's near-ecstasy while running his fingers through the Whales 'sperm' while touching the fingers of other whalers doing the same with Ishmael gazing into their eyes, it made me wonder what Melville might have been trying to imply.

When I finished and closed the book I thought that the artful and fantastic philosophizing of Melville, along with the originality with which he picks up the style and substance of Shakespeare's soliloquies to make his own points, mixed beautifully with the building adventure story to make a great statement about human beings' tragic universal struggle against fate and mortality. In the end this superseded and redeemed any distracting subtexts, and turned a rambling tour de force into a great work of art. But those subtexts are such a huge part of this book, that I cannot help but wonder if at its core -- at the emotional level -- the book is nearly as much about struggling with one's sexuality as it is about man's search for meaning in the highest sense.

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"I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts"

Having reached the mid-life point, I didn't "get around to" reading MOBY-DICK until just recently. I'm certainly glad that I finally stopped putting it off. Herman Melville's work is truly one of the most amazing books I have read. As others have pointed out here, it's not always an easy read, but it is well worth devoting time to. Indeed, I approached it as if it were an artisan cheese or a fine glass of wine; I ingested it slowly, savoring it over a period of months.

MOBY-DICK is told (mostly) through the eyes of a seaman ("Call me Ishmael"), beginning with his journey to Nantucket to find a job on a whaler and then continuing with his voyage on the Pequod. The initial chapters (minus the introductory matter) are somewhat misleading in that they employ a traditional narrative structure--quite amusingly describing Ishmael's first encounter with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg--and the unaware reader who enjoys this initial rollicking ride may be disappointed with the "digressions" that follow.

Once the Pequod sets sail, the narrative adopts the rhythm of a voyage, i.e., long days at sea, labor-intensive with respect to the upkeep of the vessel, but otherwise dull, interspersed with heart-stopping whaling and welcome encounters with other ships. This pattern of life at sea is reflected in the book's structure in this way: the long, uneventful days lend time to the narrator to present the history, science, and art of whales and whaling, while the whaling and ship encounters brings the narration back to a more-or-less (and often less) traditional narrative structure.

The core story is well known, and would be familiar even to those who haven't much other knowledge of the work. (Anyone who's seen or read JAWS would recognize the story.) A psychologically scarred and physically mutilated man, Ahab, the captain of the Pequod, is obsessed with exacting retribution against the highly dangerous white whale that made him a cripple, not to mention killing many other men. His loyal first mate, Starbuck, tries to reason with him, but Ahab is unable to respond to reason; Ahab feels that he is acting out a preordained role.

MOBY-DICK, which was first published in 1851, is a surprisingly modern work. Melville explores the story using multiple perspectives and various literary devices, most notably inserting chapters written as scenes in a play. An example of this can be observed beginning with Chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck": This is a seminal chapter in that in it Captain Ahab explains the Pequod's true mission--to kill Moby-Dick--and his personal motivation for doing it: "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby-Dick that dismasted me..." Chapters 37-40, which are given sequential temporal titles ("Sunset," "Dusk," "First Night Watch," "Midnight") provide reflections on Ahab's speech to the crew from the perspective of three of the main characters, Ahab, Starbuck and Stubb; these are followed by a chapter written like a script of a musical play and which involves a number of crewmen. There is, in short, considerable exploration of and experimentation in narrative forms.

What I found particularly moving were the small, almost painterly touches in Melville's writing, such as the image of a hawk in the far distance dropping Ahab's hat into the sea (Chapter 130, "The Hat"). Also delighting the reader are the intensely cinematic moments, e.g., Starbuck, standing outside Ahab's door and full of angst, ponders murderous thoughts while handling a musket (Chapter 123 "The Musket"). MOBY-DICK is a fabulous piece of art and is veritable literature worthwhile reading.

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Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself.

Introduction by Andrew Delbanco
Explanatory Commentary by Tom Quirk