What is Moby-Dick about?

Moby-Dick opens with one of the most famous sentences in American literature — "Call me Ishmael" — and immediately establishes a voice that is learned, digressive, sardonic, and strange. Ishmael signs onto a whaling ship out of Nantucket, joins a crew drawn from every corner of the globe, and gradually discovers that the captain, Ahab, has a purpose beyond commercial whaling: he is hunting the white sperm whale that took his leg on a previous voyage. The rest of the novel is the hunt.

But to describe Moby-Dick as a novel about whale hunting is like describing King Lear as a play about inheritance. The whale becomes, in Ahab's mind and then in Ishmael's narration, a repository for everything unknowable: God, fate, malice, indifference. Ahab's quest is insane, and Melville knows it; but he also takes it seriously, giving Ahab some of the most powerful speeches in the American canon. The question the novel asks is not whether the whale is actually evil — it almost certainly isn't — but what it means to organize your life around an enemy that may not even recognize your existence.

The book is also genuinely difficult. Melville interrupts the narrative for extended treatises on cetology, on the mechanics of whaling, on the history of how the whale has been represented in art and literature. These chapters are not filler. They are part of the argument: Melville is showing how much human knowledge has accumulated about the whale and how little that knowledge penetrates the whale's actual nature. The digression is the point.

Moby-Dick was a commercial failure on publication. It was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now widely regarded as the central work of American literature. It is long, it is strange, and it demands patience. The readers who bounce off it usually do so around page one hundred, in the middle of the cetology chapters. Those who make it through typically describe it as one of the most rewarding reading experiences of their lives.