Everyone has flaws, and Ishmael is no exception (and I don’t consider being too meditative a flaw). And as immoderation in positive qualities can become negative, Ishmael can suffer from a surfeit of his infectious enthusiasm.

For me, “The Whiteness of the Whale” shows this quality most clearly. This is where Ishmael’s task is [...]

It seems I have a bit of an Ishmael obsession; I have not even mentioned Ahab, nor Starbuck, Stubb, nor Flask. I love them all, but my real love is Melville. And as careful as I try to be about separating narrators from authors, Melville’s narrators are Melville-narrators. Is Ishmael’s voice stronger than Tommo’s [...]

The structure of Moby-Dick is remarked on often enough, and certainly it’s not traditional. Like Melville’s earlier books, Moby-Dick is divided into a great number of very short chapters. Some of these chapters propel the narrative, others are doing something else. Of those that propel the narrative, some focus on life on the Pequod, [...]

One theory I have about Moby-Dick is that it relies particularly heavily—as do all Melville’s other works I have read so far—on sympathy with the narrator. Ishmael pours out so much of himself into his book that if you don’t like him much, I can understand why you might not like the novel.

Of [...]

It’s an awful cliché, but one I can’t help addressing: why is poor, dear Moby-Dick so often represented as the typical example of a long, boring book that no one really wants to read?

I don’t want to say that no extant human might read this book and find it boring. For one thing, [...]