Carpenter, I hardly knew ye

Oh sweet carpenter, I feel like I barely got to know you. One minute we are introduced to your stunning woodwork in building Queequeg's coffin and the next minute you are sinking to the bottom of the sea in the crushed carcass of the Pequod. I speak for all when I say your fine woodcraft will be missed by all.Fedallah on the the other hand can shove it, good luck being a whale's necklace for the rest of your existence. Ahab, I wasn't always your biggest fan but I must say you went out with some bravado. Your delusions of grandeur became quite amusing, especially toward the end when you began to realize your final soliloquy was probably going to be titled "I'm Getting Eaten by a Freak Sonovabitch Whale God." I do have to say I was pulling for you, and don't quite feel you deserved all the bad luck. I mean really if God didn't want you to kill all those whales he probably shouldn't have filled their heads with sweet perfumes. It'd be like my parents striking me down for breaking a pinata with delicious candy in it. But I digress.

Moby Dick in it's later chapters had me wondering where this whole thing was going. I mean really I kind of thought "is this gonna end? is this gonna end?" and then four chapters later thought "...wait, it ended?" As far as content goes, it is fun to be sarcastic about Moby Dick but I really did enjoy it mostly, through fits of confusion. I have to say though, that I mostly enjoyed it for it's parallels on religion and some points it made on culture and humanity through the whaling trade, but was dissapointed with the lack of direction in the story for large chunks of the novel. When I strip the symbolism away and focus on raw story though, it seems to come down to this:

Moby Dick is a story about not quite interesting characters doing not quite boring things, on a boat, and then dying.

I don't quite mean to say that none of the characters are interesting, as Ahab Ishmael and Queequeg, as well as certain crew members really had some great stuff going, but rather than being used as characters they were often just used to portray different sides of the world views. It really feels like the hunt for the White Whale, and Ishmael's adventure is just a vehicle for Melville to state some new ideas. Groovy ideas they are, but I still feel slightly gypped with the potential this story held and how often Melville took us aside to turn this into a documentary. It'd be like watching Gladiator and having it get put on pause to explain the eating habits of slaves in gladiator camps. I think at some point very early on Melville should have decided whether he was going "Epic Adventure Novel," or "Philosophy on the High Seas" or "Whaling for Dummies" but not all of the above.