I’ve read particularly long books before. In my pre-college years, I have read books that are hundreds of pages long–even book series like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. But out of all the long novels I’ve read during teenhood and early adulthood, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a special case.
When I picked this book up from the bookstore on the first week of class, I didn’t know what to expect. At first, I thought this would be another book to just read and be done with it. But as soon as I flipped to its table of contents, my jaw (figuratively) dropped: one hundred thirty-five chapters across 600 or so pages. I stopped partway through chapter 1 during my first attempts at reading this because my brain was constantly being overloaded with all the words I was seeing at once on every page, and I just couldn’t find the motivation to continue. I eventually made it to chapter 2 on my latest attempt, but I couldn’t get past the third chapter on my own. This book humbled me. It is only when it took four weeks of pre-reading discussions and priming that I finally pushed myself to continue reading past the first chapters. Reading together made a huge difference.
According to Philip Hoare, Moby-Dick isn’t anything close to a novel, much less a book. Rather, it’s “more an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history of natural history,” (Hoare) and I’d have to agree with him on that. By describing Moby-Dick as an “act of transference,” he calls into question the process of what makes a literary text a “novel.” If Melville didn’t intend for Moby-Dick to be read as a “novel,” then why are we being asked to read it? Why were we reading it? That’s when I realized something.
As we read Melville’s book, Melville makes us read (close-read) certain objects littered across his vast sea of words as if they were books of their own. He dissects them piece by piece and examines each part as a framework for how to close read. You may have skimmed over most of the chapters since the book is so big and wordy that it’d function as a doorstop, but there are some passages in these chapters that do seem important, are they not?
And now I share my realization in this reflection with you all, after having read the whale of whales: Moby-Dick is, essentially, a guide to reading, and Melville is teaching us to read. By reading the whale, we close read with Melville so that we can think beyond the medium, building meaning in certain aspects to make the inscrutable “scrutable”. Reading helps us build the analytical and critical thinking skills that we need to become better readers.
For the sake of brevity and time, I will be focusing on one of these objects, which is the Spouter-Inn painting at the beginning of Chapter 3. It’s the end of the semester, so it’s only fitting that I come full circle and return to the one chapter that I would’ve continued to struggle on if it weren’t for the help of others who have also struggled with this book. Without further ado, let the reading begin.
The Reading
Sailing through the first two chapters, we find ourselves in the Spouter-Inn in Chapter 3, where we are greeted with a sight of a mysterious painting:
On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. (Melville 13)
A few questions I asked myself while reading the first few paragraphs of this chapter were, “why the second-person perspective? Why are we the ones looking at the painting, and not Ishmael? Why does this painting matter?” To answer these questions, the second-person perspective is a way for Melville to address the readers in a way that makes them feel like they are a part of the story. By using the word “you” numerous times within the opening paragraphs, Melville inserts the reader into the story as a character alongside Ishmael, allowing us (the readers) to see/feel with the reader-character with regard to the painting and taking Ishmael’s place. This painting, according to Melville, requires “diligent study and a series of systematic visits” to understand its purpose, emphasizing the importance of close reading.
Diligent study and systematic visits require people to devote their time to study a particular subject of interest multiple times over multiple days, and the same applies to close reading. When we close read, we don’t just read the text; we actually stop to think about the meaning of a passage/picture that we want to analyze, then explain how it connects to the bigger picture. Sometimes, it can even take us multiple days to understand why that passage/picture serves a purpose. To read something is to read it like a book. In this paragraph, our reader-character has stopped to analyze this “so thoroughly besmoked, and every defaced” painting, adding to the growing number of studies and visits taken to it. As it turns out, this painting has been read many times before, as Melville implies in the “systematic visits to it” and “careful inquiry of the neighbors” who attempted to analyze it. It is only through reading that we could “arrive at an understanding of its purpose.”
It should be noted that we do not know what this painting looks like. There are no illustrations of this painting in the book—in fact, there are no illustrations in the book at all, meaning we can only rely on Melville’s descriptions as reference for the things we want to analyze. Even though Melville has placed us within the story with his usage of “you,” we (the readers) can only rely on our imagination to envision the painting’s composition through our reader-character’s (and by extension Ishmael’s) eyes. Reading something involves seeing it with our eyes, but how do we know how “besmoked” and “defaced” this painting is if we (the readers) cannot see it from our own eyes?
The Reading of the Reading
As we continue into the second paragraph, Melville describes our supposed feelings toward this painting in excruciating detail, and here we are presented with one of the first instances of reading:
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst.” (Melville 13-14)
This is a beautiful introduction to the process of reading, and a beautiful description of the painting that we are closely reading. In this paragraph, Melville directs the reader’s gaze to the “long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast,” allowing us to visualize some of the elements of the painting without the need for an explicit description or an illustration. This leaves the painting open to interpretation, and reading involves making interpretations to make something make sense. Melville uses adjectives like “boggy, soggy, squitchy” to invoke emotion within the reader and their reader-character. Imageless yet mysterious, there is no other way to describe the painting without the use of neologisms. As Hoare points out, Melville writes these made-up words—“boggy, soggy, squitchy”—“as if [he] were frustrated by language itself, and strove to burst out of its confines.” (Hoare) This one painting frustrates Melville, the reader-character with how indescribable it is, and the reader with all these made-up terms. Even though we can’t physically see the painting, Melville makes us imagine how we’d feel when we see it in person.
There is something about the painting that captivates the reader, and Melville continues making up words to figure out what it could possibly picture: “Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.” (Melville 14) These “deceptive ideas” come from the brainstorming we do while close reading, especially when it concerns something that is either open to interpretation or has no meaning. When we read something, we use reference points like the “portentous something” to guide ourselves toward a more “correct” interpretation. At this point, we (the character and reader) are still not quite sure about what the painting could possibly mean, since we don’t have all the details and can only use the “portentous something” to guide us. With limited details, we are forced to use the more important details to fill in gaps during our analysis.
But after two long paragraphs of diligently studying this painting and wondering what it could possibly represent, Melville gives us an answer; or, at least, his answer:
“In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.” (Melville 14)
In the end, despite the many interpretations and racing thoughts that you have with this painting, you will ultimately realize that the “portentous something” in the painting that you were “diligent[ly] study[ing]” and making “a series of systematic visits” to is the great whale, crashing onto a ship, likely taking the ship down with it. According to the general consensus, the “many aged persons” that have read the painting before you, these are the last moments of a whaling ship before it is hunted by the hunted. Although this interpretation isn’t quite perfect, as implied in the phrase “the artist’s design seemed this,” it is about as close as it can get to the artist’s intentions.
And that, my friends, is reading.
Concluding Thoughts
Moby-Dick, as well as this class, taught me a lot about close reading, and I wanted to put it to the test on one of my then-least favorite chapters of Act I. I never thought that I would be able to close read at this level before, and I’m really glad that I chose this class to develop this skill with my classmates. Sure, it seemed really scary at first since it involved having to actually read the text and push our interpretations toward a larger idea; sure, we have to write a lot and expect a grade for completion and content; that’s the point. This class is supposed to put your reading and writing skills to the test. It’s an ECL (English & Comparative Literature) class, after all.
While Moby-Dick may not be considered a novel in the traditional sense, it can be interpreted as a book about anything. It can be an “act of transference” (Hoare), about whiteness, history, American capitalism, slavery, solitude, the ocean—heck, it can even be about nothing at all. Moby-Dick is a book that reads how you want to read it. For me, Moby-Dick is a book about learning to close read. And after 135 chapters, it was very much worth it.
P.S. Phew! I haven’t pushed myself to write this much since 508W. Two thousand words about the first three paragraphs of the third chapter. Final essays can really get you going.
By the way, have you noticed that the start of this essay is so long that it has taken multiple paragraphs just to get to the point? It’s almost as if it is refusing to start, just like Moby-Dick! That’s how you know how influential that book is.
Now that we’ve finished, I think it’s time for a month-long rest. Happy reading, and have a great break, y’all. You deserve it. I do hope I get to see some of you again in the AI literature class next semester.
Works Cited
Hoare, Philip. “What ‘Moby-Dick’ Means to Me”. The New Yorker, 3 November 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-moby-dick-means-to-me. Accessed 16 December 2025.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Andrew Delbanco and Tom Quirk, Penguin Publishing Group, 2003.