Reminder that Moby-Dick is the ultimate pleb filter for English-speaking readers...

Reminder that Moby-Dick is the ultimate pleb filter for English-speaking readers. If you cannot appreciate this masterpiece, you have no business on Veeky Forums.

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worthwhile post

I’m not even posturing or trying to make myself look good, but I have no idea how someone could read even the first chapter of Moby-Dick and not concede that it is extremely beautifully written and insightful. Even within the first few paragraphs, it just feels good to read. I think most people don’t even pick it up and just assume it’s long winded garbage because of its past reputation.

why did the critics shit on Moby Dick when it was first published?

Moby Dick was experimental fiction and most critics are in the business of telling you whether or not you'll enjoy commercial fiction. It probably wouldn't have been reviewed much at all if Melville weren't already famous for his more mainstream work.

Melville's early novels that collected him marginal success were essentially adventure novels. Young men, hired onto a boat, getting into life-endangering hijinks in exotic, remote islands of the world. Heavy plots. Moby Dick hit the market and no one knew what the fuck to think of it in the wake of the sort of novels expected out of Melville.

>Young men, hired onto a boat, getting into life-endangering hijinks in exotic, remote islands of the world.
This sounds fun.

It's like popular literature in the form of the Old Testament, with scientific or cultural whale tales taking the place of the categories of leprosy and how to build a tent, and the occasional moral parable including complete shitfucks, and a whale that is supposed to be some big villain, but who only shows up a handful of times. It doesn't make much sense. It's a Whale Bible if there ever were one.

Fuck you.
Just because for once a novel stops focusing on the mundane trivial personal stories of little people with their little problems, and shoots for the majestic and global, that doesn't make it a masterpiece.
Just because a novel doesn't bother with the quirks of a character's identity, but instead demands the reader to question identity from the first sentence through the last, doesn't make it a masterpiece.
Just because the author somehow transcends symbolism, going through symbolism and out the other side to impart something viscerally real. that doesn't make it a masterpiece.
Just because it created an entirely new mythos we all take so much for granted that references to it are considered "trite" doesn't make it a masterpiece.
Just because it seems to embody the narrative of the American identity in a way that no other novel seems to have captured, doesn't make it a masterpiece.
Just because it's written for a particular audience, readers with life experience and heartache and hope and desire and dismay, and therefore rough going for those too young to empathize, doesn't make it a masterpiece.
Just because the symbolism not transcended strikes the American soul right in the heart and makes it question yet validate its very essence... that doesn't make it a masterpiece.
What the fuck were you thinking?

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>le arbitrary opinion of """""""value"""""""

it makes plenty sense, only it's construed wrongly by unpoetic minds

I honestly don't think anyone has truly comprehended what grand messages Melville was trying to give with Moby Dick, Only i know what those messages were. They are full of universal truths. Truths that go beyond the third dimension and into the nth axis. Moby Dick is my bible by which I lead life! Let us no longer brood over what subtitles we might have missed out on! Accept the ocean as your true creator. A shapeless geometry that mocks all man made gods. And what of Moby Dick? he is that part of sanity which defends its self not only in this vast and uncaring ocean, we might call life, but also from mans need to make sense of life itself!

As far as sailing ship novels with crazy captains and side characters more interesting than the protagonist go, I liked The Sea Wolf much better than Moby Dick.

You must be either twelve or a socialist.

But Captain Larson was my favorite character.

Is this copypasta?

Only pleb Americans. It was well received in Britain for example IIRC

>"its Ok to skip the boring parts"

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>moby dick has boring parts

It does though and intentionally so. Melville shit all over the idea boredom has no place in stories. The book demands you go through the pain of the sailors

>You must be either twelve or a socialist.

False choice dilemma

i finished Moby Dick last week, i was a little tired of reading about all the facts about whales, i also thought the ending was over pretty quick after persuing Moby for so long ,it is well written but not really my cup of tea.

>the Moby Dick fad is starting up again
Good.