Reading the introduction to Moby-Dick made me considerably nervous – not dissimilar to the nervousness I experience watching movie trailers in the modern era. I do not long for synopsis, I do not strive to have my stories spoon fed to me in digestible segments shorn from the story like butchered meat before I ever get the opportunity to read it for myself. I want to dive into the ocean of language, into the thick of the chaos and make my peace with my ability to sink or swim along with the author’s current. The farther into the introduction I read, the more I found things that my brain will elect to latch on to thanks to Andrew DelBanco’s focus on them – such as the figure Bulkington that is due to appear in chapter three and then “recedes from view until twenty chapters later” (xvi). I do not wish to read about how “everything becomes unmoored, vulnerable, dispensable” (xviii). I wish to find myself adrift!

                When not exposing the story beats, speaking of important later moments well before the time we access them ourselves, there is much to dissect and carry with us as we venture into Moby-Dick. DelBanco’s belief that “Melville…extracted a human sample from a culture he both loved and abhorred, and he made of the Pequod a kind of Noah’s ark” is absolutely fascinating (xxi). Yet more amazing still is the knowledge that these human capsules are still reflective of figures in power today. It’s impossible to discern which is a more terrifying revelation: That time is inevitably cyclical, forever repeating the mistakes of the past with brighter clarity, or that the individuals in power frequently exhibit the same monomania of the doomed captain of the Pequod. Our ship continues to steer into darker, dangerous waters, my friends.