My name is Herman Melville. I wrote the greatest novel of all time, Moby Dick

Reminder that Cervantes, writer of the truly greatest novel of all time (The Bible), never read Shakespeare.

>what life experience did Melville have

Smh desu

When will a female author write Moby Vagina?

Your name is Herman Melville. You are a big fat liar because you basically grew up on KJV, read a lot, not "a bit" of Shakespeare and also a shitton of other books, which is proven by your ridiculously erudite writing. Also hunted whales and lived with cannibals to get additional experience and writing material.

He was an avid reader of philosophy, particularly the utilitarians.

Stop making shit up.

Why are so many chapters of Moby Dick basically unnecessary to the story, as in moving the plot along?

Why do we need a 10 page chapter on mast heads that he read about?

he was also secretly gay

He has actual experience whaling, for example.

because it's an experience as much as it is a story.

And black.

>Why are so many chapters of Moby Dick basically unnecessary to the story, as in moving the plot along?
How did you find this board?

>muh prose

>muh shitpost

It wouldn't have been possible without this man

Literally the first 5 or so pages are direct quotes from a myriad of works

Yeah fuck reading a story for the STORY

Hugo went on a 30 page in depth description of the history and reasoning behind Paris's sewers for 6 pages of plot-driving story in Les Miserables

What are you trying to prove by presenting another bad book as an example?

Ur point?

No, he didn't at all, you fucking idiot. Why do I even browse Veeky Forums anymore? Almost everyone here is an underaged dumbass.

this

>being this ill-attuned to irony

>this damage control

Go back to rebbit, faggot. You don't belong here. You're cancer.

wow... who is baiting who?? i cant even...

I'm not the same user. That "fish" comment is flatly ironic. I mean, even people who haven't read a word of Melville know that "fish" as an archaism means "any animal that lives totally in water." He even ended it with "huh?" Maybe you should read more so as to have a better grasp of written irony, instead of getting furious about nothing on Veeky Forums

>Maybe you should read more so as to have a better grasp of written irony
>thinking that user has even read Melville
>thinking his post was ironic

>I mean, even people who haven't read a word of Melville know that "fish" as an archaism means "any animal that lives totally in water.
Maybe if you're an idiot, sure.

The Old English "fisc," from which the modern word is derived, literally meant "any animal that lives entirely in water." That's why we have words like shellfish, starfish, etc. They're linguistic holdovers from when the general sense was more widely in use.

I'm not assuming he has read Melville, hence the comment about people who "haven't read a word of Melville." But you can't deny he (Melville) uses the word "fish" to describe Moby-Dick, and in this context it most assuredly is meant in the esoteric sense.

I don't know why you're so frustrated. It's not a funny ironic comment, it's hamfisted in my estimation, but it's still irony.

Itt

Autism

>but it's still irony

>octopusfish
>eelfish
>sealfish
>planktonfish
>crustaceanfish

I'm frustrated because Melville specifically states, in Moby Dick, that whales aren't fish. But, of course, you wouldn't know that, considering that you obviously haven't read it. Please fuck off, you wank.

His narrator also calls Moby-Dick a "spouting fish with a horizontal tail."
>I'm frustrated because Melville specifically states, in Moby Dick, that whales aren't fish.
That's what irony is, ya fuckin git. Implication of the opposite through order of expression or tone.

>he's still posting

Enough with the damage control, kiddo. It's getting trite.

>no more arguments
>shout "damage control!"

I hate Moby Dick, not because I don't like the story itself but because it has a great story that is buried between pages and pages of completely irrelevant shit.

>defending another's anons ignorance as irony
>doesn't want to admit his mistake
>incessant damage control

wew, lad

Ah, I see you're rolling over because you're out of fuel. The insecurity of Veeky Forums is astounding.

No he doesn't
He decides that whales are fish

Pleb

Reread Moby Dick, faggot. You probably skipped all the chapters on cetology.

>I see you're rolling over because you're out of fuel
>deciding to stop discoursing with someone who's unwilling to admit their faults is running out of fuel

Call me whatever you want faggot, I read novels for the story, not to get 45 chapters of whale and whale hunting trivia shoved down my throat despite 90% of it being just Melville trying to show off how much he knew about those topics.

well you read the wrong book then

Obviously but it won't stop me from complaining about how much I hate that.

>Melville trying to show off
Who is he trying to impress? What a retarded statement. Herman Melvile wrote whole chapters of a book just to make himself seem more impressive. What would he have to gain? I'm trying to think of a witty comment to end this post, but the fact that your own insecurities made you actually believe that Melville is trying to show off to some unknown person is just an impressive bit of ego projection

>First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, ‘I hereby separate the whales from the fish.’ But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the leviathan.
>The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: ‘On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,’ and finally, ‘ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.’ I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
>Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

proof? this might change my life if true

To the people reading the book, obviously.
It's not even something no else has ever done, a shitton of authors waste chapters and chapters trying to show how much they researched about some irrelevant topic. Someone in this thread even brought up Victor Hugo, who does exactly the same shit in Les Miserables.
The worst part is that if the story was shitty then I could just throw the book away with no regret but the actual story in Moby Dick is interesting enough to catch my attention which makes me curse Melville every time I am forced to read 4 chapters about whale semen before I can get back to the story. And no, I can't skip the trivia bits, my autism prevents me from skipping parts of a book, no matter how irrelevant they might be.

i don't think it's so much showing off as it is him just really fucking liking whaling. he wrote a big book about how rad he thinks it is and the story is just a bonus

Whales are fish

I admit that's possible too since I have no way of knowing what was his motivaton for including so many trivia chapters.
Even so, he should have toned it down a it or just written an encyclopedia.
Fuck, I'm not even saying he should have removed all the chapters that don't focus on the story, some of the trivia is pretty interesting and it contributes to the story but there are also chapters where he goes on and on about things that are pretty much irrelevant to the story and don't improve it in any way.

Whales are mammals. Mammals aren't fish. It's simple logic. But I wouldn't expect Veeky Forums to understand that, as no one here is STEM.

get out nerd, whales are fish and you won't do shit about it

Do fish have lungs? Do fish give birth to offspring like mammals? Do fish have blowholes? I thought so, faggot.

Whales are birds you fucking retards.

>i am better at putting things into boxes, behold my power and kneel.

Did he really get such magnificent prose from only reading Shakespeare?

>implying whales can't be both mammals and fish
Fucking brainlet

Probably not, but I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that he relied on anything stylistically, he was a genius

Lad, you simply didn't understand the book. Read it again when you have transcended beyond reading for plot or prose

It's romanticism. All the extra details give you the same sense of understanding as some of the central characters of the work to give you a more full experience. Also, you might learn something too, which is nice for even very obscure knowledge.

You're missing major aspect of transcendentalism and romanticism. One of the major focuses is finding and putting great meaning in the insignificant. The details make it a more interesting and full experience and hopefully make the whole thing a more grand experience overall

This. Also, I don't give a fuck how long he spent on whaling vessels, the level of detail in the chapters on cetacean biology wasn't achieved by looking at whale carcasses, he had to fill in the gaps with studying.

he litterally says whales is fish in the bõok

Oblomov? Notes from the underground?

He did multiple times, have you even read the book you faggot?

He read spinoza......so it's probably fair to deduce that he read Descartes too

No, he was extremely well read. He likely read all of the major greeks, literary and philosophical, in their own language.

>prose ficiton
lmao

how new

And making shit up

i read the hershel parker biographie of melville, i think hes the scholar who edited the northwestern-newberry versiosn of his work, which i think is considered the standard, so when you buy a melville book, if its not directly from northwestern university press, check the copyrite to see if they're using the definitive version of the text that scholars consider the best. anywho, i read parker's biographie of the guy (herman melville) and parker p much said what the op said, only a little different. what happened was that america was a new country, green valleys and blue skies and everything, it was like the new hotness, like a brand new baby that everybody wanted to fuck, but there was one problem and that was that it didnt have any good literature. europe was like: umm, yeah, america, your literature is sort of, its not the best-- you know, we have shakespeare, we have dante, we have cervantes, you know, we're gonna have joyce in a little bit, your literature's just not up to snuff, it's a bit primitive you know. a bit shit if im allowed to say that. so herman melville and nathaniel hawthorne got together and they were like man fuck europe. these guys are a bunch of pricks. so what they did was hawthorne wrote some stuff, and melville liked it, so he was like ok what im gonna do is im gonna pretend im not melville, just some random guy, and go in the newspapers and call you "the american shakespeare." im gonna say fuck shakespeare, he's not even that good, hawthorne is the new shakespeare. praise hawthorne. hawthorne was liike, yeah, thats good, good thinking, melly (called him melly, read the bio); and so melville did that, but then something unexpected happened, that he didnt expect. he became jealous of hawthorne's success and he went over to hawthorne drunk one night and he was like "youre not even that good, youre not the shakespeare" and hawthorne was like "youre the one who said i was shakespeare, i didnt say i was shakespeare, you saiad it, im not shakespeare, i never said it, melly" and melville said "dont call me melly anymore, you turncoat bastard" - and so their friendship deteriorirated and melville was like im gonna write my own shakespeare. but he had never read shakespaere, so he went to nyc and went into the boook shoppe and was like gimme your finest shakespaere editions, and he went home with like eighteen complete shakespares, didnt realize they were all the same. to make up with hawthorne he brought him a shakespeare, he was like i bought eighteen, hawthorne was like "whyd you buy bloody eighteen?" he said "idk, do you want one?" hawthorne said "fine, melly, leave it here, thanks, off with you now" and melville went home and read shakespeare, and read him, and read some of the kjv too, and he was like these guys are pretty good, i think i'll try my hand at my own shakespeare/bible thing, and that was moby-dick. moby-dick cmae out, nobody read it, except hawthorne.

bi**
(like every other patrician)

I get that this is bait and all but what most people don't understand is that Melville's style in general is digressive as fuck

he spends whole chapters in Typee explaining how they cook their breadfruit, marriage customs

not saying they aren't necessary to the story and not denying that it can sometimes a bit annoying but that's Melville's style

whalers knew a shit ton about whales, my friend.
he spent 8 years at sea

Excellent story

>My name is Ishmael and today we will be hunting Moby Dick, or The Whale.

Fucking really?

>I read novels for the story
Wow, I did not know Moby-Dick was such a pleb filter.

>write a book called My Dick, make multiple obvious references to how intellectuals will completely miss the intent and value of the work by obscuring its exoteric nature, and even write a forward about how a sub-sub librarian (a person writing critical texts on critical texts on literature) will be forever doomed to never know the beauty of My Dick.
>there are people to this day that still argue the whale chapters have some deep insightful commentary when its just Melville padding out the novel for laughs and talking about what he's interested in
>next chapter opens with a dick joke and no one catches it because they are still stuck on the fucking whales

You all are such fucking idiots, jesus christ.

What a peculiar post.

Read the book without coming into it expecting some massive, intellectual endeavor. You might actually be able to catch that there are dick jokes on practically every other page. The inspiration by Shakespeare is obvious: the glowing philosophical musings is just window dressing for the meta-humor of laughing at idiotic intellectuals too "smart" to realize the intent of the work was dick jokes.

give us three examples of these dick jokes.

Who the fuck are you even talking to?

I enjoyed this post. Please write more.

Very good.

Now please stop doing drugs and learn punctuation.

its cormac mccarthy, show some respect

thomas browne.

milton.

charles dickens.

emerson.

has anyone on Veeky Forums ever actually read [herman melville]?

me