Classic Book of the Month - Moby Dick

[Germanicus]

So the Classic Book of the Month for May will be Moby Dick by Herman Melville. This is the perfect book first book of the month for tPF.

So if you have not read Moby Dick then read it. If you have read Moby Dick read it again. ( unabridged )

So you read it and tell us what you thought of it. Give us a short review. If you have read it Im only kidding about you having to read it again. Why do you like the book? What have you noticed that you think the sparknotes may have missed?



In my opinion the people that review books are often retards and also propagandists. Like I hate 'spaknotes' because they are mostly wrong and brainwashing nonsense that ruins a book.

Why did you like Moby Dick? What have people missed?

I will write a review later maybe. For now I will just say that I was beyond disappointed with how it ended. Angry even.

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[Heyduke]

I don't know if I've ever read the whole book. I've checked it out from the library a few times. I watched the movie with Gregory Peck just last month. It's a Biblical movie, with references to Noah's flood among other Biblical themes, and the Moby Dick movie reminds me a little bit of Aranofsky's Noah. There's the sense that underneath the surface of this tranquil planet, a great menace lurks.

I've been through a few major natural disasters, as most of you also have. I've been at the epicenter of major earthquakes and inside of a house hit by a mudslide. I could go into greater detail, but trust me that I've witnessed Mother Nature taking over and making the tiny humans squirm and pay the price for their pathetic little fragility. When I was in 7th grade, 17 people died on my road from mudslides. Most of them are still buried up there.

In Moby Dick, I get the sense that Captain Ahab is attempting at all costs to overcome his vulnerability to Nature.

"These are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang."
--Chapter CXIV

[nathanbforrest45]

I always thought Moby Dick was just the latest STD.

[Heyduke]

Orson Wells plays the part of Father Mapple in John Huston's Moby Dick (1956)

Chapter 9: Father Mapple's Sermon
""Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog- in such tones he commenced reading [a hymn of Jonah and the Whale]. Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah- 'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters- four yarns- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God- never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed- which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do- remember that- and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning in his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,- no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye. ...
"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.""

Father Mapple's sermon sets the table for the future plot as, many chapters later, we are introduced to Captain Ahab-- a figure whose character is diametrically opposed to that of Jonah

[Heyduke]

In a sense, Ahab strives obsessively to slay god (or god's messenger). Ahab is protrayed as an incomplete man. Within him is a gaping hole, filled with hate for Moby Dick. And don't we continue in that effort to this day? Like Ahab, is it not our ambition to slay god, and therby preserve ourselves, and to take command as the undisputed Captains of this world?

Father Mapple continues;

"" I fear the Lord!" cries Jonah. The God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!

Again, the sailors mark him: Wretched Jonah cries out to Him! Cast him overboard. For he knew.

For his sake, this great tempest was upon them.

Now behold Jonah: taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea, into the dreadful jaws awaiting him.

And the Great Whale shuts to all his ivory teeth like so many white bolts upon his prison. And Jonah cries unto the Lord, out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, Shipmates. He doesn't weep or wail. He feels his punishment is just. He leaves deliverance to God. And even out of the belly of Hell, grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, God heard him when he cried.

And God spake unto the Whale. And from the shuddering cold and blackness of the deep, the Whale breeched into the sun and vomited out Jonah on the dry land. And Jonah, bruised and beaten, his ears like two seashells, still mutlitudinously murmuring of the ocean, Jonah did the Almighty's bidding.

And what was that, Shipmates? TO PREACH THE TRUTH IN THE FACE OF FALSEHOOD.

Now Shipmates, woe to him who seeks to pour oil on the troubled waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Yea, woe to him who, as the Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway. But delight is to him who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth stands forth his own inexorable self, who destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from the robes of senators and judges! And Eternal Delight shall be his, who coming to lay him down can say:

- Oh Father, mortal or immortal, here I die.
I have driven to be thine,
more than to be this world's or mine own,
yet this is nothing
I leave eternity to Thee.

For what is man that he should [outlive] the lifetime of his God?"

Oh indeed. What is man that he should outlive his god? Or, as Nietzsche describes, how wretched is man after god is murdered by our own hands? Nietzsche decribes the post-god world thusly; "A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it be one of the poorest in meaning. This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a "scientific" estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is "music" in it!

[momsapplepie]

I thought we were reading Pride and Prejudice????

[Heyduke]

I thought we were reading Pride and Prejudice????

That's kind of a girly romance novel with lots of tea and bonnets and crumpets, isn't it. And, it's British. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would seem an odd choice for the inaugural tPF book club book.

[Matty]

That's kind of a girly romance novel with lots of tea and bonnets and crumpets, isn't it. And, it's British. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would seem an odd choice for the inaugural tPF book club book.

You never even thought of a TPF book club so stop being a dick. The people who thought of starting the TPF book club are reading Pride and Prejudice.




There's always a whale sized dick in every crowd.

[Peter1469]

It has been a long time since I read Moby Dick. I have not read Pride and Prejudice. Of course I have seen the movie (only when forced to by g/fs)

[Germanicus]

I hate Jane Austen. I think.

edit- she is a realist anyway.