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, [...]

As Mardi tackled slavery and Redburn the condition of sailors, slums, and emigrants, White-Jacket also has a social-comment component. The simplest thing to focus on here is corporal punishment in the navy. The descriptions are explicit and upsetting; Melville’s rhetoric is in full force and he thoroughly demolishes flogging as bad for body and [...]

“It was not a very white jacket, but white enough, in all conscience, as the sequel will show.”

That’s how White-Jacket opens: with the whiteness of the jacket. White enough for what? “[W]hite, yea, white as a shroud”; “in a dark night, gleaming white, as the White Lady of Avenel!” And of course, white [...]

Melville is such a satisfying author to read chronologically. Typee is so young and fresh, Omoo a bit more jaded, Mardi a letting go and an exploration. With Redburn the sails are trimmed, but perhaps just a bit too much. And then White-Jacket, which serves as both a culmination and a prelude.

White-Jacket has [...]

In what is probably a pattern for me, I’ve talked about how I was disappointed with Redburn even though there was a bunch of stuff in it I liked (my other pattern is to talk about stuff I didn’t like while saying something is good; this is how I get a reputation for ambivalence, [...]

I feel like I don’t write about it particularly a lot, but narration is one of the things I’m relatively more interested in when I read. I try especially not to fall into the dread trap of equating author with narrator, but some people make it hard—people, say, like Melville, who writes loosely autobiographical [...]