#i would've word-vomitted even more BUT I FUKCIN RAN OUT OF CHARACTERS SOMEHOW

[opalescentegg]

So the thing about Moby Dick is that, like. It's a weird book, right?

For one thing there's the sliding between genres thing, in that there's everything from Shakespearian-style soliloquies to lengthy, Homeric metaphors, to anatomical studies, to flights of philosophy & theology---to say nothing of how the first-person narration will just quietly slip fully into another character's head without commenting on it at all. And it's not that it's exactly hidden that Ishmael is an unreliable narrator---plus there's the whole thing where Queequeg says they're married as he'd all "oh, silly Queequeg not understanding English, we just slept in the same (one-time bridal) bed & spooned & cuddled pillow-talked, he just means we're best buds :D"; like....sure, Jan. By the by, this book is one of the most homoerotic texts this side of the Iliad that I've encountered. And speaking of homoeroticism, what can I even say about the chapter where the crew has to constantly work the spermaceti found in the sperm whale's head with their hands in order to keep it at the proper consistency, which our narrator blithely describes as "squeezing the sperm." Aside from all of that though, it's completely fascinating how, the longer the voyage goes on, the more the style of the story begins to dip into a kind of magical realism---I can't help but think about a moment near the end of the book where Ahab has declared that all the crew is an extension of himself, a collection of limbs for him to manipulate; because that's kind of what ends up happening. The captain is the ship & the crew is the captain and the ship is the crew, and at that moment individuality dissolves and the Pequod becomes one single organism, going up against the great organism of the white whale. Is that why Ishmael gives us the thoughts and feelings of so many of his crewmates? Was it a gesture towards that eventual (and, per the themes of the novel, fated) experience of the Pequod, or a result of it? What does this have to do with the theme of cannibalism? I'm actually fascinated by that particular theme, especially in how it plays into the crew's interactions with whales---of course they're killing them & rendering their fat for oil, and it's a grisly process that the book describes, but outside of those times the whales are described more or less as people, with emotions and family relations and desires and so on. And hell, I haven't even touched on how, in some ways, Ishmael as a character is defined more by what he doesn't say than by what he does---I'm particularly struck by how, after Queequeg's near-fatal fever, both he and Ishmael begin to disappear from the text; Queequeg is only alluded to as one of the group of harpooners, while Ishmael stops giving any information about anything he's assumedly doing as part of his literal job on the ship. It's only after the ill-fated final encounter with Moby Dick that we even learn where he was at the time everything was going on. It's almost like, the closer the story gets to its inevitable tragedy, the more Ishmael wants to distance himself from it (maybe that's part of the reason for his digressions---if he didn't "pad out” the story so to speak, he'd have to actually talk about what happened). That may also be why he stops mentioning Queequeg, even though he told us near the beginning that he stuck to his, uh, companion "like a barnacle" ever since Nantucket---like, he can talk about his near-death, but his actual death is a wound too painful to touch. Hell, Ishmael doesn't say a single word about how he feels about seeing the Pequod sink, or how he felt in the minutes and hours after---or even about where he was when it happened!---until the Epilogue, which is less than a single page. For all of that, though, the last sentence in the book fucking breaks me. I listened to an audiobook version as this my first experience of the story, but all the same when I came to that line and it was all over I had to just stare at the wall for a little bit.