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.