For this week’s reading, I will be responding to “What ‘Moby-Dick’ Means to Me” by Phillip Hoare. I chose this reading specifically because, as a lot of us have mentioned, we either take little or renowned interest in Moby Dick, or have struggled to read it in the past. Despite this, we have all ended up in this class together, determined to get through the novel and understand it from a new perspective. In Hoare’s article, he refers to Moby Dick as “not a novel…barely a book at all.” I found this interesting, given that there are several definitions of what a “book” could be. Oftentimes, a book does not need to meet literary guidelines; it could be made up of the most sappy, stomach-flipping, agitating nonsense and still be cleared off the shelves. I compared Hoare’s first opinion of Moby Dick to those in our class; he claims the novel “defeated” him the first time around, and I feel as though our read through of the novel might result in the same for many of us.

Even so, the uniqueness of the novel is what inspires us, like Hoare, to come back and read it once more. Whether we are in it for the facts (real or imagined by Melville) about whaling, the homoerotic relationships created throughout the novel, the dangers of sailing the open sea, cannibalism, or much, much more, Moby Dick is only what we make it out to be. I believe this is why so many people fall short of enjoying or understanding the novel their first time around. Might it be from a lack of comprehension of what Melville discusses, or the boring length of the book and the chapters that draw on endlessly, if the reader is not picking up on certain parts of the novel and the individual uniqueness of each part, and how they all tie in together, then they are ultimately losing the whole purpose of reading the novel. No wonder it took Phillip Hoare practically 30 years to finally enjoy Moby Dick!