I'm on Chapter 100. I'm loving it so far, but I genuinely can't grasp any deeper meaning behind it or some subtle metaphor about the human condition other than the surface level character deconstructions of Ishmael and Ahab. Most of the time, any meaning I could derive from some of the chapters Ishmael or Ahab already declares their insights and interpretations already while other times it just feels rather meaningless (Stubb's zodiac rant on Chapter 99) or informative rather than artistic (cetology chapters)
Am I just searching for deeper meaning here over nothing? I don't dislike it but I want to know if I'm trying too hard to read too deep into it
Good on you, I hope you make a thread once you finish reading it.
I probably will yeah
I'll watch them once I'm done with the book
Noted
I thought that was already explicitly mentioned during Ahab's backstory where Moby Dick was already likened to God? Well, more accurately he likens it to the supernatural personification of all the evil in the world. I wouldn't really consider it a deeper meaning if it was already hinted at or mentioned by a character
It's a very obvious and surface level reading but if you're struggling to understand, viewing it through the angle of Moby Dick as God it can help get yourself thinking more abstractly about the book.
The irony of struggling to understand a book ABOUT struggling to understand, hehe.
It's my first time reading a book in a non-academic context
I feels so bad for Ogre. I almost wept for his pure, innocent honesty and self-awareness.
>inb4 ogre rips me to shreds
Ready for my never-went-past-grade-11-english-and-haven't-read-a-book-since-A-Feast-For-Crows take on it?
The deepest meaning it gets on human condition is about the dangers of obsession (read: every Aronofksy film). Funnily enough, it all sprang from Melville's obsession with the whaling industry.
>it all sprang from Melville's obsession with the whaling industry.
it didn't though
I am at chapter 20, does this book keep this gay?
queequeg becomes a side character after they ship
moronic zoomers take every example of male friendship as queerness
moronic IQfyers take every example of gayness as friendship unless there's graphic anal sex but even then not necessarily
they're literally married
It's indeed queer, stubb also is very queer.
dont go for the deeper meaning, read for the story, once you finish and think about the story, youll sense that deeper meaning by yourself
Im on my third re-read and its just now starting to give its secrets to me
The most basic, accessible way to begin to understand Moby Dick is to replace every mention of Moby Dick with "God".
Mah ↄd.
You really should have read the KJV bible first. It's a necessity for Moby Dick.
watch these
idk man, unlike other authors Melville is very clear with his metaphors...why did you think Stubb's zodiac rant was meaningless? it was a great passage, Stubb basically describing the 'life of man in one round chapter' through the doubloon...the doubloon chapter in general is a commentary on the act of "reading", which Melville kind of lets slip when he has Stubb say "Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts."
Melville doesn't really moralize in Moby Dick...there's not really one clear "message" you are meant to take away with it, he's just attempting to convey The Struggle if ya know what i mean? of how hard it is to live in this world and find something to ground yourself in and believe in, in a world where you are constantly bombarded with meaning too many meanings ends up feeling the same as being meaningless (whiteness of the whale chapter)... this is partly a critique of the Transcendentalist movement that was popular during Melville's time, but the modernists of the 20th century would take these themes and go even farther with it which is why many people believed Melville was actually ahead of his time writing like this in 1851
>Muh noble savage
>Muh new england humanism
Fricking homosexual book.
"God" (or "Nature, if you prefer) is a totally alien, monstrous presence that creates a variety of incomprehensible, unpleasant things just to gruesomely devour them; the whale is merely another mask of the omnipresent malevolence that lurks behind and animates all things - our fates and our very existences are puppeteered entirely by the most insidious force imaginable
If there is a benevolent reality somewhere beneath the pasteboard masks of this loathsome cosmos, it is totally transcendent and beyond our reach while a deranged abomination runs the show down here, a la Gnosticism
thats just what Ahab believes bro, don't tell me you forgot Ishmael's warning...don't look into the face of fire for too long!
Towards the end even Ishmael seems like he's become convinced that the whale is the mask of something unspeakably horrible
I haven't read it but the white whale is a metaphor for a wiener huge enough to satisfy the captain's unholy lust
OP, the deeper message of Moby Dick is: this is the sort of shit that happens when you don't hire a good editor