As the semester comes to an end, I’ve been thinking back about how this class changed the way I read Moby-Dick, but also how I read literature in general. When we started, the novel felt overwhelming to me because it was too big, too strange, too full of digressions about whales and ropes and blubber to make any sense. But somewhere along the way, I think through our weekly blog posts and close-reading exercises, I started to see that Moby-Dick isn’t a book you “get” in one go. It’s a book that teaches you how to read it as you move through it. And that process of learning to slow down, to focus on a single sentence, even a comma, ended up being one of the most valuable things I’m taking from the course.
One of the biggest skills I developed this semester was close reading. Before this class, I understood the concept in theory, but actually practicing it every week forced me to go beyond surface-level interpretation. I am (still) learning how to zoom in on a phrase and unpack it until it opens into a whole world of meaning. Whether I was analyzing Starbuck’s desperate moments or Ishmael’s reflection that the whaleman “lives in light” in Chapter 97, I realized that Melville’s writing rewards slow attention. The more I practiced explication, the more I started noticing how Melville builds entire ideas out of tiny details: the way the color white becomes terrifying, the way light turns both holy and hellish, and the way the ocean becomes a metaphor for the unknown parts of ourselves.
A huge part of that shift came from how this class framed Moby-Dick within Blue Humanities. I had never thought about literature through an oceanic perspective before, and Blue Humanities helped me see how Melville uses the ocean to rethink what it means to be human. Instead of centering land, stability, and certainty, he places us in water: fluid, unpredictable, and unknowable. The ocean in Moby-Dick becomes a space of connection and vulnerability. Seeing the novel through this lens made me appreciate the environmental undertones, too. When Ishmael describes the killing, boiling, and rendering of whales in such detailed but industrial language, it becomes impossible not to think about ecological violence and the human hunger for mastery over it. Blue Humanities gave me a way to understand these sections not as digressions, but as essential parts of the novel’s argument about power, exploitation, and the actual cost of human progress.
Thinking back on the blog posts we wrote throughout the semester makes me realize how much my relationship to the novel has changed. At first, I was kind of confused but interested, not fully sure how to approach such a massive, chaotic text. But each post forced me to commit to something specific. That practice taught me that meaning doesn’t come from “finishing” the book; it comes from engaging with the tiny details that build it. By the time we reached the final chapters, I wasn’t intimidated by Melville’s style anymore. Whether Melville is describing the ocean as a mirror of human consciousness or showing the consequences of obsession through Ahab, the book constantly asks us to look inward and outward at the same time. What I learned in this class goes far beyond Moby-Dick itself. I learned how to slow down, trust my observations, and use textual evidence to build ideas instead of relying on summaries or generalizations. I learned how to treat literature as something alive, something that reveals new meanings depending on where you point your attention.
