Herman Melville

 
There is something about Moby Dick that sends the idea that there exist literary conventions totally out of orbit. I couldn't think of a more rewarding read but what it is that one has exactly read remains a contentious issue in the aftermath because one is not sure quite how one got through the barriages of sentences after sentences of what I can only think of calling as descriptive poetry.

The presence of mystical qualities is presupposed only by the prevalence of that interpretation but one is guessing. It could be read as a literary inquiry into the venerable nature of the whale, as such large creatures go, thus to pose the first condemnation of whaling, perhaps, given the way the story ends.

 
Ishmael is therefore Melville himself, the survivor of high sea adventures and in the story the necessary narrative device, as the one who stood outside of the events and merely observed, learned and recorded in the mind, great conversations, meticulously told observations of planktons, assorted sea marvels and their intricate relationships with the mysterious ways of the levithian.

There are men who would emulate the nomadic instincts of whales but is it not the prospect of riches that motivates the making of harpoons and the equipping of ships that carry out the murderous plot? One must keep the lamps burning, yet practical exigence cannot explain the power in the will that sends them out over the waters to engage on the annointed hour with the object of such strange desires that mankind invents. This being the content of a story, the folly of Melville's literary ambition seems entirely comparable with the deeds he attempts to describe.

There is nothing familiar in the life he describes. The language is highly charged. Parsing every sentence in a book is not someone's idea of fun but it is as if the general incomprehension is what is intended. When the imagination can take over the discomforts are obvious. How could it be that going to war can make sense at all in any form except as something sublime and morose? Perhaps as human experiences go, life at sea - the monotony broken only by sudden terrors, the necessary horrors implied by the mission - can only meet its literary counterpart by the use of transcendental language.