It was a metaphor for God

It's a simple tale about a man that hates an animal.

The Leviathan is a metaphor for the great white societal monster. Clearly.

user finishes a 500 page book and the greatest American novel. His mind still full of the grand romantic adventure and the beautiful imagery. He is fully in envy of the rich prose and he sits down to write in his journal for the night
>Just finished Moby Dick, so I guess the whale was a metaphor for God? Huh, old folks sure loved talking about God. I sure am great at this literature shit, not like my sister who only reads plebby genre fiction. Tomorrow I'm gonna read Don Quixote. I bet it's a metaphor for modernity or some shit.

I think the whale is mandatory relationship with God. For instance it is the White whale. White is both the absence and inclusion of all the colours.

Man's*

it was a metaphor for the pursuit of absolute knowledge

What was Pip supposed to be?

yes. It's worst opening sentences, and it starts off "He only had one enemy left. Two, if you counted God." I can't remember if it's this one or the CRASH! Mom made pancakes one that is followed by "Holy...I want more..." in the reddit comments.

a metaphorical representation of kwanzaa

>So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, OR STILL WORSE AND MORE DETESTABLE, A HIDEOUS AND INTOLERABLE ALLEGORY.

Chapter 45, Moby Dick

these

Is moby dick a meme or a good book?

Pretty good alternative book title.

The entire thing was basically symbolism for Lucifer's rebellion against God with Ahab in the role of Lucifer.

Garbage interpretation.

It's probably one of the greatest books of all time. Here are some of my favorite parts, judge for yourself if it's worth reading:

>Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

>Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic over.

>Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when— There she blows! —the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.

>But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Moby Dick, or the Simple Tale About a Man Who Hates an Animal.

>le funny bacon libertarian man

kek

>A fictional character in the narrative made a meta joke about allegory, therefore Melville is telling us to avoid abstract interpretation
This is a stupid argument, stop being so contrarian.

I see your point but you can equally take the narrator's view as Melville's, as I did. It's going to be hard to form an argument but I will say that allegory is often frowned upon by a lot. Tolkien especially despised it, and unlike using a fictional character to say it, he outright said it. I really can't imagine in my reading of Shakespeare, Melville, Tolkien, Homer, Ovid, or any given great, turning things into allegories. Literature has so much more to offer when one does not turn to allegory. I can see someone doing a critical reading of a text but to say that the whale represented God or a woman or any given thing: what has that done? I have yet to see any deployment of allegory lead to a reading that bettered the reader as a human being. What other point to reading is there besides that and being entertained?

This. Searching for allegory can only ever deprive the reader of richness. So Ahab is Lucifer, the whale is God. Now what? What do those statments add to your understanding of the book? Reading to find an allegory is the brainlet path to literary analysis. Just draw a comparison between two narratives, call it an allegory and add another book to your list of Big Brain Achievements

>Whiteness of the Whale
The book is about Ahab's obsession with big white cock. Much like the Onion's analysis of Jaws which was itself a poor-man's Moby Dick

youtube.com/watch?v=zPOX2kNAZ6I

double kek

yeh just a meme, everything is just a meme, dont read anything and then you'll never have to read a meme

If a 500 page prose epic could be summarised in a line it wouldn't be worth reading now, would it?

Yeah the God one had "Holy... I want more"

Dunno annon I never thought the Whale was god. Parts of the book were concerned with Ahab's obbsession with the Moby, and his persuit of him at all costs. The whale may be the futility of revenge.

The different whaling boats they encounter give Ahab good reasons to stop his pursuit of the White Whale and he dismisses each one. He is only eager for information about his obsession.
He is shown wealthy whale men on their return home, whale men so poor they dont have oil to light their own lamps, they find a Captain desperate to save son from the sea and Ahab shuns them all to hunt this beast that ate his leg off
and he and all his crew save Ishmael die because of it.

How did the White Whale end up as God in your eyes?

Did you miss the chapter when he describes white as the colour that turns evil into a greater horror. The whitness of the whale was not a positive trait

Positiveness has nothing to do with godliness

>The whale may be the futility of revenge.
Nah, that's too simple. Look at Ahab's 'strike the sun/pasteboard mask' speech. There's something a lot more profound about it, at least to him.

>there are unironically brainlets on this board who STILL don't understand that Moby-Dick was a contrafactum of the Book of Job

Understatement moves user. Both Melville's titles are by contrast neutral.
>Simple...Tale...Animal

triple kek

But, is a whale a fish?

I love this extract

>It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

How has nobody mentioned Job yet?

Nonsense. Use of allegory, just like discussion of any other literary device, is a jumping off point by which we can discuss the text and possibly gain a deeper understanding.

See . user was prompted to respond to perhaps the most common allegory made of the story, and gave their own take. The only crime in literary discourse is trying to stifle discussion.

>The only crime in literary discourse is trying to stifle discussion.
Many anons stifle their own thoughts before they even happen and allegory is a common tool by which they do that. The post you quote isn't an interesting allegory, it's a response to an allegory that seeks to achieve a greater understanding by rejecting it. Search for allegory, sure. But don't do this

quadruple kek

I have a hard time believing you actually managed to get through all 800 pages of Moby-Dick when you can't even read through a thread with 51 replies

Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs:
the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.

Got a chuckle out of me so have an upvote, friend!

White about a polar bear? Checkmate, whalefags