Moby Dick

Faggot

Shut up bitch

What do you want to know? You want sharp criticism of the novel? There's not much to critique. Moby-Dick is one of the only works of literature which almost the entirety of the academic and critical community views as an example of a near-perfect novel. Here's a concept, why don't you just read the book for yourself so you can intelligently discuss the novel with your perceived intellectual enemy.

Are you admitting you're too stupid or lazy to actually come to a conclusion about a novel yourself?

I haven't read it yet (it's on my shelf, one of the few books I took with me when moving for a while) but after reading Bartleby I am worried that Melville was just a forecoming of today's faggy Jew / women New Englander type of writer. I also opened moby dick ti a random page and it was less biblical more whimsical

Im a philosophy major, I don't have time to read Mr Biologist goes whale watching.

>Philosophy Major
>Doesn't have time for Moby-Dick

You're a psuedo nigger who can't think for himself. Moby-Dick is one of the most philosophically charge novel ever written.

You're baiting now. Fuck off.

what, may I ask, is the point?

>Im a philosophy major, I don't have time

> wants to critique a book he won't read, a book universally accepted as the great American novel

OP can't seriously be this much of a faggot

There's literally an entire book on why you should read Moby Dick.

...

On a broad level to join in the struggle and the neauseating mono-obsession of the crew and feel yourself wreaking as you look for the effeble profundity amongst the drowning absurdity of the whale as the object of the quest

too many adjectives

>all these pseuds jumping at the chance to gang up on OP
you do realize Veeky Forums is a board based around critiquing books they haven't read? it's all they do

>taking the bait this hard
I expect better of you, Veeky Forums. While I'm here I wonder if anyone has anything to say on Moby Dick being the first (and perhaps only?) instance of American mythology. I know that's a bit vague, but I'm curious if viewing Melville's depiction of the whale as quasi-religious would be a productive way of thinking about the book. The extensive accounts of the whale's biology, the mythic anecdotes of whaling adventures, the whale's ubiquity in 19th century commerce--all of these things suggest that Melville (and maybe his contemporaries?) appreciated (perhaps worshipped?) the whale the way people appreciate a deity.

t. Resentful after having his shitty author ripped to shreds

I realize you feel smart for using a coupe ten dollar words there possibly in an attempt to obfuscate slower readers but your post can be reduced to
>to make the reader feel as bored as the crew

Not just bored, fucking pissed off and sick of God forsaken whales too

t. doesn't read

>This book is so good that we can't even explain why its good

>Its so good that I can't possibly critique even the smallest part of this book

You fuckers sound like fundamentalist Christians sometimes. I doubt more than a 1/3rd of you have read this beyond the Wikipedia entry.

>You fuckers sound like fundamentalist Christians sometimes

Okay hotshot, why don't you respond to my inquiry above

uhhmmm racist much? are you just going to ignore the rich native american mythology which existed thousands of years before Melville jerked off into a whales blowhole and wrote a book about it?

Oh we can explain why it's good. But we're not cucked faggots who spoon feed pseudo-intellectual assholes just because they want to "shove some talking points down their throats".

>we
so this guy speaks for all of us here including me? or is he just reddit af

He is actually our elected spokesman

>being this bad at baiting

You sound like the kid on the playground who bragged about having 6 Mewtwos on his team but would never show anyone or battle because "it wouldn't be fair".

Fuck off, pseud.

>falling for the bad bait bait

>OP trying to bait so he can get responses for his high school essay

how is that bait? I'm objectively right, native americans did have a rich mythology long before moby dick was conceived.

maybe you should go back to /pol/ if you just want to pretend other cultures don't exist.

Congrats, you win the Veeky Forums non-sequitur of the week award!

>implying English majors are superior to any life-form more advanced than a sponge

>Any legit posters or just endless ad hominem?

The latter, you ignorant wanker.

>projecting this hard

He was talking about actual America, not Pocahontas America

>get's BTFO
>Y-you're p-p-projecting
lmao pathetic

Since everyone in this thread is functionally retarded, I'm gonna keep this simple.

3 Positives about Moby Dick
- Whales are cool I guess. Free Willy was good.
- The prose is ok
- Adventure stories are fun

3 Negatives about Moby Dick
-Too fucking long. 30 page diatribes about whale biology and history of whales.
-Too much homosexual imagery. The indian guy is from Gay Head for fucks sake. May as well have been from Fire Island
- Obsession with the whale was fucking stupid. Its an ocean mammal. Was ahab really worried about Moby coming into his room at night and sperming up his guts? Plus they had guns on the boat. Why resort to doing something stupid like getting in its element and stabbing it?

Anyone else enjoy Melville's autistic rants, such as the one about how people draw whales completely wrong?

Not much to critique in one of the greatest novels ever written. Fuckin hell Veeky Forums shall we just stop now?

>the great american novel
>makes you sick of whales
>whales are fish

>Obsession with the whale was fucking stupid.

THATS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT YOU RETARD

Eyyyyy I get that stans, but I really struggle to call the whole thing great. It's the one classic that I can agree with the 'it's boring' crowds.

he means 'negative stuff' by critique

and what am I supposed to gain from that? it's a shitty gimmick and melville shouldn't have put it in there.

Moby Dick is the best book I read this year desu

Well, there are some plot inconsistencies. For example, a character gets introduced early on with much fanfare but is never mentioned again.
Also, the middle section isn't as intensely genius as the rest of the book, it's only really good.

>the point of the book, the concept that guides everything is a gimmick and it shouldn't be in the book

Not even the same user, you projecting fuckwit.

Protip: there's a world that exists outside your own head, which the rest of us call "reality."

you keep saying it's the point of the book. so if I write a long boring book about y balls and how I clean them and jerk off and you were to tell me it's shit and I said that's the point of the book would that make it a good book?

what am I supposed to gain from this "point"of being a boring fucking book?

bait

it's honestly not. I'm sick and tired of Veeky Forums jerking off dead white men's shitty books but not one person can explain why they're good. you guys are worse than reddit.

You're all a bunch of pseuds and if I could I would fight all of you.

If Moby Dick is boring to you, stick to best sellers

yeah when you're called out cause you can't back up what you're saying it's always bait. keep telling yourself that you fucking pseud pussy bitch

This dude has a point. The extended metaphor bullshit is tiring. The book is influential / a masterpiece etc., but I don't think it's wrong to acknowledge this.

Its not a metaphor, only plebs believe this

It's great because it's deep like the sea.

"There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness." -HM

>pretentious
>English major
>talking points

Grow the fuck up.

I'm a philosophy major. I've read texts that would make your plebian little face melt off like you had just opened the Arc of the Covenant.

For all your circlejerking, pretentious english major bullshit, you cannot find one flaw in a 600 page book.

Grow up and learn how to critically analyze things.

>when the barristas are arguing about some autistic shit and you just want your coffee

Did I say anything about being an English major? How do you know what I've read?
If you're so intellectually capable, read it yourself, you fucking caricature, I'm sure you'll find more "flaws" than any of us.

>JUST A MOMENT, SIR

yes I'll have a caramel machiatto extra foam please.

>IT'LL BE JUST A MOMENT, SIR
>WE'RE REALLY BACKED UP

Jokes on you, i'm unemployed.

>Woah man, this book is like so deep. It literally invented american mythology as we like, know it man. Its so good that I can't even explain why its good, you just gotta like, vibe with it yourself man.

I sent a thank you card to the man who raped you.

Classic donkey brain right here.

Sure, it's not like art can only be truly evaluated by engaging with it directly and on its own terms.

I read How to Read Kant and looked at a message board. Let me totally """mindfuck""" you with why Kant is wrong now. Culture is about me winning and looking smart.

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY in this thread has given a single coherent reason, not even subjectively, on why Moby Dick is even a good book.

I'm convinced this is /lits/ equivilent of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, /k/s version of the Mosin Nagant, and /v/s version of Vanilla WoW.

Idiots, all of you.

what is it then and why should I as a reader care?

Bullshit, you can't know a novel unless you read it, like any other text. You can't even properly debate it until you've read it. This is such a basic fucking principle in any field of knowledge that I can't believe somebody has to explain it to you.
The only way I could give you what you're asking for is to literally copy and paste the novel onto the board.
"Moby-Dick is a great novel because of the way it integrates several different genres into an exegesis on American destiny and the inevitable destruction of its own culture."
Not good enough, right? Yeah, nothing will be good enough. You have to read the book.
I'm not even defending Moby-Dick, I'm telling you that if you're setting out to tell people why a book isn't good without having read it and identified problems yourself, there is no good reason to listen to you.

>/lits/ equivilent of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

exactly, it's a masterpiece

>Can somebody tell me why Godel is wrong about the incompleteness of algebraic systems? I want to shut up this math major and I need some talking points. No, I've never taken Algebra II. I just need a quick rundown, I'm going to own this nerd.

>literature is objective like math
>I'm an autist who needs everything to be quantifiable

Just go in on how it's "racist". Bam, perfect and unassailable criticisms.

It took me three attempts to make it through Moby Dick. I still don't see the purpose of the endless digressions on whale biology, how no one knows how to properly draw a whale, how Perseus and Saint George were technically whalers, why the color white is terrifying, or why Melville autistically decides to call a whale a fish when he knows full well they are mammals.

I quite enjoyed the scenes with the crew, but the rest is just so much filler.

bretty assailable if your interlocutor has read, say, Benito Cereno

It all has a point. Not going to make it.

The autistic one is you

>Heres a 30 page analysis about whales written in autistic levels of detail

>Heres a rant about how nobody in human history has ever drawn a whale correctly

>Also whales are mammals lol

Yeah, I got a nut... SO???

litcharts.com/lit/moby-dick/chapter-95-the-cassock

>no reading comprehension
The point being that somebody doesn't want to do the work of forming their own opinion for the sole purpose of feeling better than somebody else. Pretty inexcusable.

Moby-Dick's cetology is probably tied with Iliad's catalog of ships in functioning as a pleb filter. It never fails; I fucking love it.

>Outing yourself as a brainlet in literally the second post you make

>whales are fish

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetology
>Cetology (from Greek kῆτος, kētos, "whale"; and -λογία, -logia) or Whalelore is the branch of marine mammal science that studies the approximately eighty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoise

>doubling down on brainlet status

tfw you got into an argument with your mom over this when you were 5

There is no actual taxonomically reflective category known as fish

sure there is -- maybe you mean phylogenetic instead of taxonomic?

I take that as a given when speaking of species

It's just a great book. I don't want to describe it to all these autists, to justify it or prove to them in some way that I've read it and that it's enjoyable. That seems to fall short of what reading is all about. There's no prestige to Moby Dick, or to reading any sort of 'great book', I find. I'm not going to write essays on it, or to bring up its aristotelian nuances or the psychological traits it underlines in each of its characters, the struggle between duty and care, here or elsewhere. Besides, I feel this melanesian leaf-gathering collective isn't really the place for spouting about it in all of its details. The point is simply this: it's a great fucking read. You're there in the boat with a crew worth knowing, boring nights to learn about whales, and a creature you don't know whether or not to believe, let alone kill. It's an enjoyable book. Are there better books? Maybe. It was worth the attention this particular philistine chose to give for it.

fair enough, but I was thinking that traditional, historical, and colloquial groupings could probably be called taxa (or at least have a place in taxonomy as a discipline with an awareness of its own history) but not phyla.

I don't think he worshipped whales but I think you're right abut them appreciating it as some sort of mythological figure. I personally think Melville rejuvenated or perhaps recaptured the ideal of great myths and set them in an American context.
What I mean is that Melville lived in a time where the art of writing and appreciating great epics akin to Homer were rapidly dying out. Thus Melville set out to write a similarly profound work that intimately touches the human spirit.
Moreover, I think that the way we write stories has a lot to do with how we view the world. In ancient days we didn't really understand the world, so we made stories about Gods and demons everywhere.
In a period when the world was rapidly becoming smaller, with man having charted nearly everything and taxonomized nearly every creature, the whale represented one of the last bastions of human ignorance towards God's creation.