This will act as a follow-up to my last post on Philip Hoare’s What Moby-Dick Means to Me. For this post, I will be focusing on Andrew Delbanco’s the introduction to the novel.

I’ll admit, I skipped through the first chapters of the novel without reading the introduction, as most readers might have done on their first readthrough. I managed to stop myself from reading further when I realized that Chapters 3 and some of the chapters beyond that can span many pages. Thankfully, most chapters in this book are very short. However, given that there’s hundreds of them (135!) it’d make you feel like you’re on a whaling odyssey with Ishmael himself. I still think the introduction is worth reading; it reads like an essay on the language Melville employs in Moby-Dick and goes to great lengths to expound on the novel’s significance in the literary world.

Within the introduction, Delbanco writes that “Moby-Dick is simply too large a book to be contained within one consistent consciousness subject to the laws of identity and physical plausibility.” (xvii) It’s six hundred pages long, split across 135 chapters, and each chapter feels like you’re reading a completely different maritime book. With pages and chapters that many, it can indeed be difficult to even summarize the entirety of this story since it changes so much throughout the course of the book. You can expect the main character to go through his usual old man ramblings, seldom sticking to one subject at a time, and people will cherish those parts of the novel as a stylistic choice made by the one and only Herman Melville.

I think I’m starting to get what Hoare has said about this book being an “act of transference … an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history.” Moby-Dick is not meant to be read as a traditional novel, but as something else: for example, it can be read more like an experiment by Melville to see how much he can rattle off his knowledge on whales based his experience as a whaler. Or, it is Melville’s retelling of the sinking of the Essex from start to end. This novel is “hostile to all conventions,” as Delbanco puts it. There’s no “right” way to read Moby-Dick, and there’s no “wrong” way either. It reads how you want it to read.