Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Herman Melville Read Free Book Online Page A

was central in that attraction, Melville must have recognized a literary sensibility in some ways like his own. As the critic Richard Chase pointed out long ago, they are among a number of American novelists whose work reaches toward general meanings and abstractions more overtly than the fiction of, say, Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollop in England, who inevitably have such attitudes, but who embed them more deeply in particular characters doing particular things. Hawthorne used the term “romance” rather than “novel” when writing about his work, and both he and Melville often work through what Ahab calls “linked analogies,” the dramatized and oblique suggestions of symbolism, and they are less absorbed in the daily muck and ruck of life than many other writers.
    But whatever their similarity, there are differences between them even on this score. As Hawthorne’s notebooks show, he often began to think about a story with a general idea, often a moral statement, and then developed characters and situations to embody it. Melville began in the opposite way: Actual sights or events would catch his interest, and they would take on symbolic suggestion after the fact. Melville began with the world, while Hawthorne sought it out.
    That Melville in his last two novels moved in Hawthorne’s direction may help explain why the creativity of both men diminished well before the end of their lives. Both Pierre (1852) and The Confidence-Man are fascinating works, but both are overtly intellectual in the sense that the issues they address are at least as much in view as their characters, whose actions serve to raise problems whether they are solved or not. Both books cry out for “interpretation.”
    This is a different orientation to fiction than that of the author who is primarily caught up in the lives of his characters as they work out their fates in the world we all know. The diversity of human life is without end, and such a writer can continue with vitality as long as energy and imagination hold out. But everyone has only a limited repertoire of ideas, and the writer who puts ideas first is more likely to run out of material. Individual artistic gifts are unpredictable, of course, but Hawthorne’s late romances were left unfinished, and Melville fell silent as a writer of fiction not only because his audience turned away but because he had said what he wanted to say in prose; he therefore turned to poetry.
    In Moby-Dick Melville was in the flood of his powers, and modern readers have been endlessly interested, often coming to varied conclusions because the book’s most striking images and actions seldom have one clear meaning on which everyone can agree. Symbolism in this novel is well illustrated by “The Doubloon” (chap. XCIX), in which members of the ship’s crew examine the images on the coin that Ahab has nailed to the mast as a reward: Each makes a different interpretation, and this is in miniature the pattern for the whole work. Melville does not urge on us his own reading of the novel as a whole, and up to a point varied conclusions are legitimate as long as they are put forth with evidence and tact.

Meanings
    When one contemplates life-chances as portrayed in Moby-Dick , the narrator’s most striking gift is his ability to navigate cheerfully between the opposing forces of nature and the alternating appetites of mind, his compass the lessons of experience. There are few certainties in the world, and wisdom is to live as one can, in the face of mysteries, without pretending that they are anything else. A recurring image in Melville’s work is a language that cannot be deciphered. One sperm whale is “marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back!” (p. 249), and another is compared to the huge wine-cask in Heidelberg that is “mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematic adornment of his wondrous tun”