"Call me Ishmael..."

(Please note: This article contains many spoilers.)

There are only 365 days in a year. There are but 24 hours in a day. This being the case, the vast majority of us will have a “bucket list” of books, movies, albums, games and goodness knows what else, that we’d like to get to. At some point. If we’ve got the time.

However, there’s the other list we all have. The list of projects begun, books started, games half-played. Life concocts some reason for us to leave them behind and we never return to them. Or, even worse, we try, again and again, to conquer them, but something always seems to come up. This was the case with Moby Dick and I.

It was one of those books that I’d always intended to read; I’d rented it out from the library on a couple of occasions, but just never got to grips with it. (It was, perhaps, a little ambitious for a 12-year-old.) Then I got hold of a second-hand copy some years ago–it remains a mystery where this went to–but that too fell by the wayside, probably because of football, computer games or (more likely) meeting my soon-to-be wife. Nevertheless, the time was ripe that I finally captured my white whale. Truly, I couldn’t consider myself well-read without having conquered such an essential tome. What did I find? Was it all I hoped it would be? Did I suffer a ruinous shipwreck of all hope and, exasperated, float away on a makeshift life-raft of modern digital escapism? Was it, in fact, worth it?

One thing that must first be commented on is Melville’s prose. As I delved into it once more, I could easily understand why, as a youngster, I simply couldn’t get through Moby Dick. For those intolerant of florid, convoluted and willfully obtuse prose, it’s something of a work-out. Just take the example of one paragraph, the third paragraph of chapter 43 (“The Whiteness of The Whale”). It’s a single sentence; a single sentence of 471 words. 471 words. I know, I counted them.

Yes, the late 19th century did demand more elaborate, almost excessively intricate, writing. However, for the modern reader it can seem an impenetrable wall, an incredible edifice of words constructed to support, on occasion, the simplest of ideas. There are whole paragraphs that could be reduced to a handful of words. Even in its barest moments, Melville’s language is off-puttingly ornate.

Having said that, once you get to grips with it, you realize that it serves its purpose well. It conjures up an operatic, bombastic tone. One of epic grandeur that puts even Tolkien’s legendary tomes to shame.

Once you get past this initial barrier, it truly is an astounding read–detailed, immersive, thought-provoking and layered with allegory, symbolism and ambiguity. The very first paragraph sets off all manner of questions.

“Call me Ishmael.” Immediately we’re on the back foot. Is this character all he appears to be? Do we even know his real name? If we don’t, is there some meaning to his chosen moniker? Remember, Ishmael was Abraham’s son, sent into the wilderness, marooned in a barren wasteland, seemingly devoid of a future until Providence sustains him.

This initial line also establishes a personal relationship between the narrator and the reader, a relationship that book-ends the work, as the Epilogue begins with a quote from the Biblical book of Job: “And I only escaped alone to tell thee.” A nice touch, neatly tying the entire book together and presenting it to the reader as a personal account, a cherished retelling for your benefit.

Melville’s Biblical references certainly don’t end there, in fact they’re too numerous to recount. However, one Bible book, that of Job, seems to particularly inform Moby Dick. Firstly, the eponymous whale is a direct lift from Job: “Leviathan”, the one that God declares to Job as the greatest of His works. The master of the watery deep.

It’s certainly no coincidence, as Ishmael finds himself in a similar predicament to Job, enduring countless dilemmas and disasters, all completely out of his control. Yet out of them all he is eventually delivered, he alone.

Frankly, you could write volumes about the character of Ishmael: his possible reflecting of any number of Biblical characters and stories; his ability to swing wildly from flippant, self-deprecating comments to biting sarcasm or inane, ponderous technical details about whaling and ships; the hint of confused sexuality; the possible relationship to (at that time) a floundering and confused America, seemingly being dragged along to an unknown future by forces unwanted and unstoppable as the old world passed into industry. Volumes of subtext. Easily.

So we won’t go there. What did strike me quite hard was the ambiguity. Very few questions are answered. For instance: what is the whale? Is it representative of God? The unstoppable industrialization of the times and its huge impact on the traditional whaling industry? Is it nature, pure and simple? Or blind vengeance, evil and terror? Undoubtedly, Melville never wanted to give us an answer.

After sighting the whale’s forehead, Ishmael describes it, criss-crossed with scarring and wrinkles, as having the appearance of hieroglyphics. Does he find a meaning there?

“If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”

Again, the emphasis is placed on you, the reader. Ishmael is our only link into this world, if he can offer no explanation of the whale, then we must render our own. Personally, I feel the author’s links with Job are too strong to be ignored. By the end of the novel, Ishmael has endured his tribulations and survived. He has faced reality, inscrutable, incomprehensible and ungovernable. He has stood fast in the face of madness, hatred and insanity and come to an abiding conclusion: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” He has learned acceptance. The knowledge that raging against the world, against the unreasoning disasters and ambiguity that we all endure at times, can lead only to self-destruction, the “woe that is madness”.

Thus we come to Ahab, at once a tragic figure and a villain. Again, we see Melville aptly naming his characters. Ahab was the wicked King of Israel that, swept along by the unrelenting force of his wife Jezebel, committed unspeakable acts of cold violence and destroyed the lives of others to attain his desires.

When we first meet Ahab, he resembles a tragic figure: mutilated by the great whale, lost to the wife and family he has left behind. There is hope though, glimmers of nobility beneath the covering veils of hatred and wrath. Soon though, we see that he is consumed, willing to put his crew through any dangers, willing to sacrifice them all for that one chance to face down his nemesis. He even abandons his religion, his obsession pushing him to abandon his pacifist, Quaker roots and risk all to slake his thirst for vengeance.

His final words, oft-quoted (hello, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) neatly encapsulate how little is left of the man. This is now a collection of meat and bones, glued together only by hate, fury and an unreasoning desire for revenge.

“To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Knowing he is to die, knowing his crew are condemned along with him, Ahab lunges a spear at his mighty foe, “Thus, I give up the spear!” A final, futile act of bile-fuelled rage. One that brings with it his annihilation.

No longer is Ahab a tragic character, here he has turned absolutely to villainy, despising the lives of others and offering them up on the altar of his malice.

Moby Dick is not an easy read. I didn’t even find it an enjoyable book. But it is an important one, important in its themes (the futility of hatred, the self-destruction of vengeance, the dangers of obsession), important as an example of intelligent, beautifully constructed (if at times in-elegant, ponderous and labyrinthine) prose, and important for its ambiguity. If ever a book left itself open to personal interpretation and fought desperately against dogmatic analysis, it is this one. No two people will read this novel and come to the same conclusions. No two people will feel the same about Ahab, Ishmael and the assorted crew of the Pequod. As a platform for debate, I’ve read little that equals it.

Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe the real white whale is Melville himself, his intentions, motives and the meaning behind his masterwork.