MOBY DICK.
I hate this book. I hate it so much. It is 500 pages of utter whale shit. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't filled with so much goddamn filler. You could probably remove 90% of this book and not miss anything important.
And the narrator, Ishmael, let me tell you why he's a terrible narrator -- he rambles about everything. He not only describes every little thing in the most ridiculous detail, but he also goes on these insane tangents every other paragraph where he just rambles on about... anything. I would give examples but it was just so hard to focus on this guy's nonsense and I wound up forgetting most of his incoherency immediately after I read it. Still made it all a chore to read, though -- and incredibly difficult to pick out anything important (and important scenes are about as common as a needle in a haystack with this mess). Oh, and then there's the fact that he's fucking obsessed with whales. Remember that rambling that I told you about? Yeah, a lot of it is him going off about whales. First, he compares things to whales. I can get behind a bit of symbolism here and there, but that sort of thing falls apart when fucking everything can be symbolized with a goddamn whale. And then, often, he's just talking about how majestic or how powerful whales are. For no real reason.
And then there are entire chapters that just... have no place in anything. At one point, I came across a chapter where he was just talking about different whale species in what I assumed was an attempt to figure out what sort of species Moby Dick was supposed to be. But, by the end of the chapter I realized that, no, apparently there was no such goal. He just wanted to educate us about all the different whale species in the world (most of which was him admitting that there's a ton we don't know about them (given the books' age)). And the entire chapter didn't even feel like part of a narrative anymore, more like an essay. And I thought that would be the only one but noooooo there were so many more. He then decided to go on essay-like spiels about various other topics -- all whale related! -- such as, debating with himself whether a whale is a fish or a mammal, talking about artwork depicting whales throughout history and criticizing a lot of it for being very anatomically incorrect, discussing all the different ways to cook whale meat, and listing his reasoning as to why humans are kind of hunting whales to extinction. That last one probably has the most what-the-fuck ending of all of them, as, well, not only did whale populations actually reach near-extinction in real life, but Ishmael actually mentions a lot of good reasons to think that they might reach that point, even bringing up the example that there used to be plenty of buffalo in the Western US until we killed all of those, too. And then, how does the chapter end? Pretty much with him saying, "But despite all this whales can't go extinct, because they are too mighty and amazing". YEAH OK.
There are lots of tiny things in this book that have no reason to exist, either. Like, there's one point where Ishmael gets kicked by one of his boat-mates for some reason, and says in his narration, "That was my first kick". Then, in my copy of the book at least, there was a footnote attached to that statement that said, "Beyond this point, neither Ishmael nor anyone else in the story is kicked ever again".
ADJSDFJKLDSJDKL
Oh and speaking of the footnotes, which most of the time just exist to make more sense of Ishmael's nonsense, are sometimes equally pointless. Like, there was one point in the book where they were hunting a mother whale and mentioned how her milk spilled out into the ocean, and there was a footnote attached to that, saying something along the lines of, "Whale milk is actually very sweet. It would probably go well with strawberries."
WHAT THE FLYING FUCK.
Oh, and, despite how much I've already said that I hate Ishmael as a narrator, I actually find it even more annoying that he isn't even the narrator 100% of the time. Because for some reason, I think more than halfway through the book, the story suddenly switched to Ahab's perspective for about a page and a half, and then it switched to someone else's, etc etc for a couple chapters. Hey, hey Melville, if one narrator alone isn't suitable to tell your story, there's this thing you can use called 3rd person.
And I mean, it wouldn't be that bad if they were doing that sort of thing from the start, since some books can do that well, but, no, this came up completely out of nowhere, and it disappeared afterwords, never to come up again.
Oh, but before it stopped, you know what that changing of perspectives escalated to? There was at least a solid chapter where the perspective changed pretty much line-by-line, enough for each character to give one line of dialogue and maybe one action or so.
Do you know what that's called? That's a fucking stage play. The book just decided to be a stage play for a chapter or so, and then went right back to being 1st person rambling. Whaaaat.
And then, at the end of it all, the climax went by in the blink of an eye. I actually remember myself thinking, "Wait, that's it?" and re-read the last page or two. But yeah, this amazing encounter with Moby Dick that they've been building up for the past 500 pages (though I guess, realistically, it was about 100 pages of buildup and 400 pages of nothing), happened so quickly that I was barely even aware that it happened, and hardly even felt like it had a climax.
Fuck this book. Fuck it with a bloody harpoon.
Oh, and did I mention that there's an entire chapter describing a whale's penis in great detail? ashjdflkjdsklfjadskldf;ajld;
