Herman Melville openly acknowledges that his novel, like the ocean it seeks to understand, resists completion, coherence, and mastery. By likening his unfinished “cytological system” to the half-built cathedral of Cologne, Melville reframes incompleteness not as artistic failure but as a necessary condition of truth-seeking in the face of the sea’s vastness. This self-conscious embrace of the unfinished mirrors the ocean’s shifting, deceptive nature and reflects a broader philosophical claim: that meaning, self-knowledge, and artistic creation emerge through ongoing motion rather than final resolution. In presenting Moby-Dick as a “draught of a draught,” (157) Melville invites readers to recognize incompleteness not as failure, but as the most honest response to the sea, the self, and the pursuit of meaning. The novel ultimately argues that the beauty of knowledge lies precisely in the fact that it can never be complete.

Melville’s project begins with ambition. Ishmael sets out to know the whale, to classify it, to render the vastness of the sea legible through language, science, and metaphor. The novel brims with catalogues, measurements, etymologies, and diagrams, all of which suggest a desire to grasp the ocean intellectually. Yet this ambition repeatedly collapses under its own weight. Each system Ishmael constructs fractures, contradicts itself, or dissolves into metaphor. Rather than correcting these failures, Melville foregrounds them. His admission that the book remains unfinished, “This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught” (157) transforms collapse into method. Knowledge, Melville suggests, is not diminished by its incompletion; it is defined by it. The cathedral metaphor crystallizes this philosophy. When Melville writes that “grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity,” (157) he reframes unfinished work as a mark of greatness rather than inadequacy. Cathedrals, like oceans, exceed the lifespan and capacity of any single individual. They require collective effort, generational patience, and an acceptance that no builder will ever see the final form. By likening Moby-Dick to such a structure, Melville positions his novel not as a closed object but as an ongoing process. His plea “God keep me from ever completing anything” (157) is not a rejection of ambition but a deeper form of it. Completion would imply finality, and finality would betray the subject itself.

This embrace of incompleteness reflects Melville’s understanding of the sea as fundamentally unknowable. In one of the novel’s most philosophically dense passages, Melville urges readers to “consider the subtleness of the sea,” (299) emphasizing how its most dangerous elements remain hidden beneath surfaces of beauty. The ocean dazzles even as it conceals; its violence glides unseen beneath “the loveliest tints of azure” (299). This duality resists simplification. To know the sea is not to dominate it, but to recognize its refusal to be fully known. Melville extends this logic inward, drawing an analogy between the ocean and the human soul. Just as the sea surrounds the land, so too does the unknown surround the self. The result is not despair, but humility. Here, Melville’s philosophy of incompletion becomes ethical as well as epistemological. He warns against pushing too far from the “insular Tahiti” (299) of partial understanding, suggesting that the desire for total knowledge risks annihilation. This warning stands in sharp contrast to Captain Ahab’s obsession with absolute meaning. Ahab seeks a final answer, a single object that will resolve ambiguity and impose coherence on the world. His refusal to accept incompletion becomes destructive. Ishmael, by contrast, survives precisely because he remains open, curious rather than certain, searching rather than concluding. Melville thus frames incompleteness as a mode of survival.

Rather than offering mastery, Melville offers humility paired with ambition. He does not abandon the desire to know; instead, he redefines it. Knowledge becomes an act of engagement rather than possession. The reader is not invited to arrive at a final interpretation, but to remain in motion alongside the text. This philosophy aligns closely with Carl G. Vaught’s argument that Moby-Dick envisions human experience as a process of participation rather than completion. Vaught writes that self-realization depends on a “mutual affinity between the beginning and the end of the process,” (11) suggesting continuity rather than closure. Meaning does not reside at a destination; it emerges through movement. Melville’s unfinished system enacts this principle formally, embodying the continuity Vaught describes. 

This sense of continuity also explains why Moby-Dick resists singular interpretation. Ryan Crawford’s observation that the novel’s apparent intelligibility comes “at the artwork’s utter incomprehensibility” (145) underscores the danger of treating the text as a closed parable. Attempts to extract a single moral or definitive meaning flatten the novel’s complexity. Melville’s refusal to complete his system becomes a defense against such reduction. By leaving gaps, contradictions, and unresolved tensions, he preserves the novel’s vitality. Meaning remains active rather than static. The structure of Moby-Dick reinforces this philosophy at every level. The novel constantly shifts genres, voices, and tones, refusing to settle into a stable form. Sermons give way to scientific treatises, which dissolve into dramatic dialogue and poetic reverie. This instability mirrors the sea’s own unpredictability. The reader is forced to adapt, to remain alert, to relinquish expectations of linear progress. In this way, Melville trains his audience in the very openness he advocates. Reading becomes an exercise in curiosity rather than control.

Importantly, Melville’s admission of failure is not self-defeating. It is generative. By acknowledging that his system cannot be perfected, Melville creates space for imagination, interpretation, and future inquiry. Failure becomes the genesis of openness. The unfinished invites continuation, not necessarily completion, but engagement. Each reader adds another layer, another perspective, another attempt. The novel lives on precisely because it does not conclude itself. This philosophy stands in opposition to Enlightenment ideals of total knowledge and systematic mastery. While Ishmael initially adopts the language of science and taxonomy, Melville gradually exposes the limitations of these frameworks. Classification fails to capture the living, breathing complexity of the whale, just as language fails to capture the sea’s depths. Yet Melville does not reject knowledge outright. Instead, he insists on a more expansive understanding of it, one that includes uncertainty, contradiction, and wonder.

In this sense, curiosity becomes the novel’s ultimate value. To remain curious is to resist the closure that kills meaning. Melville’s unfinished book keeps curiosity alive by refusing to settle. Each unanswered question opens another avenue of thought. The sea remains vast not because it lacks meaning, but because its meaning exceeds containment. Melville’s openness philosophy affirms that truth is not a fixed object but a living relationship between the seeker and the world. By leaving his “copestone to posterity,” (157) Melville extends this relationship beyond his own time. The novel becomes a shared project across generations, inviting continual reinterpretation. This is why Moby-Dick remains relevant: not because it offers answers, but because it sustains inquiry. Its incompleteness ensures that it can never be exhausted.

Ultimately, Melville teaches readers how to dwell within uncertainty without despair. The sea is terrifying, beautiful, and unknowable, but it is also sustaining. To accept incompleteness is not to surrender ambition, but to direct it toward exploration rather than conquest. Knowledge, Melville suggests, is not something we finish; it is something we inhabit. Moby-Dick thus emerges as a philosophy of openness disguised as a whaling narrative. Its refusal of completion is not a flaw, but its central truth. Meaning does not wait at the end of the journey. It emerges in the searching itself, in the act of considering, questioning, and remaining at sea. In embracing the unfinished, Melville offers readers not mastery, but something far more enduring: a way of thinking that keeps knowledge alive.

Crawford, Ryan. “Moby-Dick, American Studies, and the Aesthetic Education of Man (Fall 2018).” New Americanist, vol. 2, no. 2, Nov. 2023, pp. 143–66. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.3366/tna.2023.0014.

Melville, Herman, et al. Or, the Whale. Or, the Whale. Penguin Classics, 2003.

‌Vaught, Carl G. “Religion as a Quest for Wholeness: Melville’s Moby-Dick.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 26, no. 1, 1974, pp. 9–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27796406. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.

***DISCLAIMER*** Regardless of the final grade, this essay has been a joy to write and a challenge in exploring close reading, self-reflection, and self-identity. Thanks for the opportunity.

In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, no chapter is as controversial or divisive as Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend,” which explores the budding friendship between the two main characters, Ishmael and Queequeg. Many scholars have dubbed this one of the first American novels of the 1800s to depict an intimate queer relationship, while others regard it as just a close friendship between two men from very different paths, looking past their cultural and religious differences. There’s obviously no right or wrong answer, with substantial supporting evidence for both arguments. I’ve reread Chapter 10 numerous times, along with Chapter 11, Nightgown, which, as one would say, is the icing on the cake of what is unarguably a queer love between two men from entirely different backgrounds, both religiously, culturally, and racially. Melville offers us only a glimpse into this complex relationship, deliberately examining his own history and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and noting that the time of publication (1851) was a stark period when things were better left unsaid. But it’s the way Melville writes these chapters, meticulously and purposefully, that invites readers to interpret them as they wish. The language employed in this chapter frames it more as a crush, a budding romance, or an impossible love ahead of its time.

 In the first few paragraphs of Chapter 10, we see Queequeg worshiping his idol after returning from the chapel of a religion not his own, and, curiously and excitingly, counting the pages of a book, which he can only count up to fifty before restarting at one. We are shown this visual through the eyes of Ishmael, who is awed by the precarious human action and facial expressions, notes that while looking at him, “You cannot hide the soul.” (Melville, 55) We see Ishmael go from awe and curiosity to admiration and inspiration, stating that “… there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.” This line has no clear meaning, but in this context, I see it as someone so confident, bold, unafraid, and defiant in who they are, regardless of negative consequences, and who exists entirely as they see fit. At this time, we see many people living authentically and unapologetically in their own skin, particularly queer people of color. This is the moment when Ishmael begins to develop affection for a person he had once thought was a lunatic cannibal, someone whom he can put on a pedestal and idolize in a way he has never shown before. “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.” (Melville, 56)

In conducting my scholarly research on the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg, I found that many of the same close-reading analytical examples were used to argue that these two characters had a queer romantic relationship. Exhibit A “and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; (Melville, 57) or exhibit B “Thus, then in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and queequeg- a cosy loving pair.” (Melville 57) and lastly exhibit C in which Holly Mauer from the University of British Columbia writes, “The two routinely sleep together, and Chapter 4 opens with Ishmael reporting that he wakes up in the morning to ‘Queequeg’s arm thrown over [him] … in the most affectionate manner.” (Maurer) This is a common example used to argue for the intimacy between these two characters, and it is justified. This is not me throwing shade at Maurer, because it does enhance her argument that Melville’s writing is dedicated to Melville and that all his writing possesses some queer characteristics, but what strikes me is how the same line is used again in Chapter 10, page 56. The preceding lines most strongly catch my attention. “I thought this indifference of his [affectionate arm] very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times, you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom.” (Melville, 56) This leads back to my last paragraph where not only was Queequeg compared to George Washington, but now that of Socrates. Ishmael is now crushing hard on his newfound “bosom friend” where Ishmael is attracted to the person that Quuequeg is his “simple honest heart” regardless of sex or gender, but it’s what Ishmael says at this beginning of this phrase that deserves some close reading. “But savages are strange beings.” By stating this first, the reader is reminded that Queequeg is of an entirely different species, just with human characteristics, and this is where the issue of race, culture, religion, and love rears its ugly head. 

In Emma Rantatlo’s MA thesis on the relationship of Queequeg and Ishmael in Moby Dick, she states, “I suggest further that interraciality is the definite thing that made the relationship possible in the first place; Ishmael can marry ‘a cannibal’ because a cannibal is able to elude the social boundaries of the mid-nineteenth-century United States. A cannibal does not live according to New England standards, but to cannibal standards, and when it comes to the ‘weird’ inhabitants of Polynesia, everything, even a same-sex marriage, is possible and even acceptable. I suggest that race in Moby-Dick is a paradox that both allows homosexuality and, at the same time, makes it impossible.” (Rantatlo 3) As I read this, my jaw dropped. It makes perfect sense that these characters are in a queer relationship, because it aligns with the history of this being written that something so outlandish and unheard could be seen as merely a work of fantasy literature. A moment that could be comparable to a knight slaying a fire-breathing dragon, because in this moment, something of this nature couldn’t exist, let alone be barely thought of. Ishmael is remarkably open-minded and tolerant for a man in the early 19th century. Indeed, after he finally works up the courage to start chatting with Queequeg and they share a smoke, get hitched, and go back to their room, Ishmael has no problem literally worshiping an idol with his best pal. “The Scholars’ refusal to read their relationship as romantic would make sense if Queequeg indeed was a noble savage stereotype […] Queequeg, when examining more closely, seems to dodge the stereotypes of typical Noble Savage imagery, and his character does not seem to exist as a realiser of sexual fantasy, either. Queequeg is written as his own man, with his own motives and agendas. Therefore, his relationship to Ishmael, a person who is willing to distance himself from his own culture* (See Chapter 10, page 58, paragraph 2) in order to feel close to a Stranger, seems to be of his own design, as much his own choice as Ishmael’s. (Rantatlo, 64) Mellville is breaking all the rules… literary, religiously, and morally, when it comes to what is tolerable and acceptable for a man in the 19th century. Still, it’s what is said in Chapter 11 that grounds this fantasy of “love is love,” and it’s that the natural state of man is to be in darkness. 

Chapter 11 is titled Nightgown, in which the Oxford language definition of Nightgown is described as a light, loose garment worn to bed by a woman. This is the only chapter in the span of Moby Dick that carries a womanly role, which is something that is rarely seen at all in Moby Dick: Women. If the previous chapter held some female characteristics, this one here undeniably succeeds. Once inside the bed together, these two characters share an intimate moment that is described in such a way that only Melville could describe it. “We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.” (Melville, 59) This passage here is the most romantic passage that supports these two characters’ love for one another. The blanket (or the symbol for the nightgown) they’re both under allows both Ishmael and Queequeg to feel vulnerable, happy and safe, by describing this harsh cold that has been granted to you from the outside world and for a moment, to share bodily warmth, to relieve you from the pain of the outside cold, becomes a sacred and blissful moment where in something that is done in private, can be shared with another individual with zero judgement, but a pure feeling of acceptance and happiness. This is more than just a queer romance; it’s about the human heart. 

This joyous occasion is ripped away instantly when the reader continues onto the next paragraph, “for when between sheets […] I have a way keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.” (Melville, 60) Ishamel realizes that in this moment,  it could never exist outside this “nightgown”. By closing one’s eyes and allowing imagination and innocence to take over in the dark, is one truly able to be who they are, even though their life would benefit more if seen in the light? This passage here is a coming-out story waiting and wanting to be told. “Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness […] I experienced a disagreeable revulsion” (Melville, 60) 

Ishmael and Queequeg, being queer lovers, are just a small fragment of life given to them by their creator, Herman Melville. There’s factual evidence to support the close and significant relationship between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne( he even dedicated the book to the guy); it’s hard not to see Melville writing some of his personal life into these characters, allowing an expression that could only be freely seen when one’s eyes are shut. The love story of these two characters would never have been visible in the mid-nineteenth century, but as time moved forward, so did the legacy and the interpretation of the greatest American novel. So, Mr. Melville, won’t you be my neighbor? (A bosom friend)

Works Cited:

Maurer, Holly. “Queering Melville.” Arts One Student Journal, University of British Columbia, https://artsone.arts.ubc.ca/student-journal/queering-melville/.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Harper & Brothers, 1851.

Rantatlo, Emma. “Interracial and Queer Relationships in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.” MA thesis, University of Turku, 2018. https://www.utupub.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/146370/ENG_MA_Rantatalo.pdf

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is often read as an expansive novel — geographically, philosophically, and stylistically boundless. Yet one of its most powerful critical strategies lies not in its vastness but in its confinement. For this project, I argue that Melville constructs the Pequod as a microscope of nineteenth-century American society, a tightly enclosed world where racial diversity, economic ambition, and hierarchical authority collide. Ismael’s observation that the crew were “nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too” (Melville 131) captures the novel’s central paradox: a collective formed out of diversity, yet defined by isolation rather than solidarity. By compressing the contradictions of American democracy, capitalism, and authority into the narrow space of a single whaling ship, Melville suggests that the forces shaping American life are not merely external pressures but internal systems individuals carry with them. The Pequod’s eventual destruction thus operates as a symbolic warning about the nation as a whole. Through close reading of key moments aboard the ship, and through engagement with Andrew Delbanco’s introduction and C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, this essay demonstrates how Melville uses constrained space as a literary form to reveal the political and cultural stakes embedded in American society. 

From the moment Ishmael boards the Pequod, Melville emphasizes enclosure. Although the ocean appears limitless, life aboard the ship is governed by rigid spatial and social boundaries. The term “Isolatoes” is especially revealing since it names a condition of enforced separation within proximity. Even as the sailors share decks, labor, and danger, they remain detached from systems of legal protection and collective political power. Ishmael repeatedly frames the ship as a world unto itself, describing it as a “little lower layer of the sea” (Melville, 131), a phrase that collapses physical depth and social hierarchy. Andrew Delbanco notes in his introduction that Melville understood America as an “experiment burdened by contradiction,” a nation that proclaimed freedom while sustaining inequality. The Pequod becomes a testing ground for this experiment. Because no sailor can leave once the ship departs, consent becomes structurally compromised. This matters politically because it shows how democratic participation can erode when individuals are enclosed within systems that eliminate alternatives. The sailors’ status as “Isolatoes” reveals how freedom can exist rhetorically while being materially inaccessible. Although the crew is multinational, Melville does not present diversity as inherently democratic. Ishmael’s description of the sailors as “Islanders” emphasizes their displacement rather than their inclusion. Islanders are people removed from land-based social contracts, existing on the margins of imperial and economic systems. This exposes the limits of representation without power. Sailors of color and non-European sailors perform the most dangerous labor, while authority remains concentrated among white officers. The ship’s apparent pluralism thus masks deep structural inequality. The importance of this contrast lies in what it reveals about nineteenth-century American democracy: difference is celebrated when it serves economic productivity, but equality is withheld when it threatens hierarchy. The Pequod’s confined space makes this contradiction visible by forcing diverse bodies into constant interaction without redistributing power.

The Pequod is fundamentally a commercial enterprise, and Melville repeatedly foregrounds the economic motivations binding the crew together. Ishameal’s explanation of the lay system reveals how capitalist logic governs the ship, as sailors are promised fractional shares of future profits in exchange for immense risk. “A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” (Melville 122) Ishmael remarks, equating labor with survival and self-improvement. This matters because it illustrates how capitalism transforms freedom into necessity. The sailors appear to choose the voyage, yet their economic vulnerability renders that choice hollow. Within the ship’s constrained space, capitalism becomes inescapable. There is no alternative employment, no legal oversight, and no possibility of exit. This intensification is important because it demonstrates how economic systems gain coercive power when individuals are enclosed within them. C.L.R. James argues that the Pequod resembles an early industrial workplace, where cooperation is enforced through dependency rather than mutual agreement (James 41-45). Melville’s depiction matters because it reveals capitalism not as a neutral system of exchange but as a structure capable of enabling authoritarian control when unrestrained. The ship’s microcosm thus clarifies how economic ambition can override ethical judgment and collective well-being. 

Captain Ahab’s authority aboard the Pequod is neither accidental nor purely tyrannical; it is carefully performed and socially produced. His dramatic nailing of the gold doubloon to the mast, “Whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce” (Melville 474), transforms a personal obsession into a shared economic incentive. This moment is important because it reveals how authority operates not only through command but through persuasion. Ahab aligns his monomania with the crew’s material desires, collapsing individual interest into collective destiny. The ship’s confined space is crucial to this process. The crew is physically gathered, socially dependent, and economically bound to the voyage’s success. In such an environment, dissent becomes both risky and isolating. Delbanco notes that Melville was deeply skeptical of charismatic leadership, particularly when spectacle replaces accountability (Delbanco xxx). Ahab’s performance matters because it demonstrates how democratic participation can be redirected into submission when individuals are denied structural alternatives. The Pequod shows how consent can be manufactured within closed systems, turning diversity and cooperation into instruments of domination.

The destruction of the Pequod represents the logical conclusion of the social structures Melville constructs throughout the novel. When the ship sinks, Melville describes it as dragging “a living part of heaven along with her” (Melville 624), emphasizing that the catastrophe is internally generated. This matters because it frames the disaster not as an accident or act of fate but as a consequence of accumulated choices. The ship is destroyed by the very hierarchies, ambitions, and obediences that sustained it. Only Ishmael survives, floating on Queequeg’s coffin—a final image that underscores the possibility of alternative social arrangements. The Pequod matters as an allegory because it demonstrates how societies collapse when authority goes unchecked and internal contradictions are ignored. Melville’s warning extends beyond his historical moment, revealing how enclosed systems reproduce their own destruction.

By confining a racially diverse workforce, a capitalist enterprise, and an increasingly authoritarian leader within the narrow space of the Pequod, Melville transforms the whaling ship into a powerful political microcosm. What begins as a collective defined by shared labor—men “equal to their task”—becomes a closed system in which equality is subordinated to profit and obedience. The ship’s destruction is not inevitable but produced by social structures that reward ambition while suppressing dissent. Melville’s critique lies not in abstract condemnation but in form. The ship’s enclosure eliminates alternatives, making domination appear natural and resistance futile. Through close reading, we see how Melville embeds political critique in spatial design, labor relations, and narrative sequencing. The Pequod is not merely a vessel but an argument that societies which equate equality with productivity, and consent with compliance, risk participating in their own destruction. Ishmael’s survival leaves readers with responsibility rather than resolution, to recognize these patterns beyond the deck of the Pequod, and to question the systems of power we inhabit before they, too, collapse.

Reading the novel through the lens of constrained space clarifies Melville’s critique of power. The ship’s physical enclosure eliminates alternatives, making authority easier to consolidate and harder to challenge. Economic dependence binds the crew to Ahab’s obsession, while charismatic performance converts personal vengeance into collective purpose. In this way, Melville suggests that authoritarianism does not arrive from outside democratic systems but develops internally when structural conditions discourage resistance. The Pequod becomes a warning about how societies, when organized around unchecked ambition and centralized authority, can willingly participate in their own undoing. Close reading is essential to recognizing these stakes. Melville embeds his political critique not in overt declarations but in the novel’s formal choices—its spatial constraints, labor structures, and scenes of collective performance. Attention to language, metaphor, and narrative framing reveals how literary form models social dynamics, allowing readers to see power at work rather than merely being told about it. The Pequod’s tight social structure is not incidental to the story; it is the mechanism through which Melville stages his argument about democracy, capitalism, and control. This project reflects my broader interest in how literature interrogates systems of power and represents social complexity. Moby-Dick demonstrates that fictional spaces can function as laboratories for political thought, where the consequences of social organization are made visible and urgent. Melville’s novel ultimately suggests that the most dangerous forces shaping collective life are not external enemies or abstract ideas, but the structures societies build and sustain from within. By surviving to tell the story, Ishmael leaves readers not with closure but with responsibility: to recognize these patterns beyond the deck of the Pequod, and to question the systems of power we inhabit before they, too, collapse.

Ugh how can I forget Halloween 2025 without Moby Dick. I could feel the immense pressure coming form Professor Pressman in dressing up and I was so constricted in choosing one thing to dress up as, I just decided to threw everything but the kitchen sink onto this luscious 5′ 11″ 230 pound big chested body of mine. I brought a pipe (in which Melville dedicates an entire chapter to), hieroglyphic pants, a captains seaward hat and topped it off with a baby whale drinking from my hairy bosom. It was indeed a work of art that was not for the faint of heart. It was a hot mess to say the least, but when it was all said and done, I had a blast. Most importantly getting to stand alone side my other class mates that went above and beyond in their efforts made it worthwhile.

After reading Blue Humanities by John R. Gillis in the beginning of the semester, I went to the beach and reflected upon it. I thought about the privilege we have to be able to go to the beach recreationally. Prior to the 1900s, the ocean was only used commercially, and rarely gone to for fun. While some places utilized the ocean for both, in America, the switch did not happen until the last 100 years. 

I sat there and listened to the ocean crashing on the sand and the people having fun. I thought about all the times I went to the beach to surf, swim, tan, run along the beach, and roller-skated along the board walk. With this easily accessibility to use the beach, comes the high cost. I was lucky enough to be born and raised in San Diego but some people have never experienced the beach. It made me think of a memory as a kid, I went to the beach with my family, like we did every week on Monday nights and I met a girl from Iowa. She came in the water with me and we began boogie boarding. She said she had never gone boogie boarding and I had to teach her. This came to an absolute shock to me since I boogie boarded every week. I had an epiphany, some people have never experienced the beach until much later in life. I thought everyone got to experience the beach, but I was one of the lucky ones. 

Coming into this class, I was shocked we were focusing one semester on one book. I am very happy we got the opportunity to do something new. Instead of jumping around and spending a few classes on a book, it allowed us to be fully immersed in Moby-Dick. 

My close reading has improved immensely. I could focus on one section, chapter, or even passage and analyze it. Practicing this, even when it was difficult, made me a better reader overall. Our class discussions also taught me to pay attention to passages that don’t seem interesting to me. When I would read, I would skim over some parts of the book since I didn’t find them interesting. When we got into small groups, other students would talk about those sections, and I would see a totally different perspective. 

This class is one that I will never forget. I also would probably not have read Moby-Dick in its entirety. This class forced me out of my comfort zone and I am happy it did. 

Coming into this class, I had never read Moby-Dick before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect beyond the usual reputation of it being a dense “great American novel.” What surprised me most, and what I ended up enjoying the most, was how clearly the book connects to ideas from the Blue Humanities. Learning to read the novel through that lens opened it up in a way I never anticipated. The ocean in Moby-Dick isn’t just a setting or a backdrop for adventure; it becomes a force that shapes identity, culture, knowledge, and even the limits of human perception. The Blue Humanities perspective helped me see how Melville uses the sea to destabilize the boundaries we often draw between humans and the natural world. The crew of the Pequod becomes a drifting microcosm of global life, and the ocean becomes a kind of archive—vast, unstable, and endlessly interpretable. That idea reshaped how I understood the novel’s structure, its digressions, and even Ahab’s obsession. Instead of reading the book as a straightforward hunt for a whale, I began to see it as a meditation on how humans try, and often fail, to impose meaning on a world that is larger and more fluid than we are.

I have never experienced a class like this until this one. Dissecting a novel the entire semester, the ins and outs, the ups and downs, and everything in between, made me feel both challenged and inspired. This class is one of the few that have taught me something I didn’t know about myself, and that’s a win in itself—taught me to ask questions, research and allow myself to go deep in thought and enjoy the silence of just being bored and looking forward to having Professor Pressman next semester and applying all that I have taken away to that. Honestly, I just took the class so I can see what fall/ early spring fashions she will bring to next semester.
Looking forward to presenting this final project when I stop procrastinating and dive deep one last time.