Melville's Moby-Dick
by Edward F. Edinger · first published 1976
46% recommend54% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Its scope and range work as adventure, a story about whaling, a meditation on fellowship and mortality, and a mythic American counterpart to Homer. It is deeply moving.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…the most memorable opening lines ever in The Crow Road. Two other great examples: William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael." Neither strictly tells the reader what the books are about, but they're great hooks.
on “How to Write an Opening Sentence” ↗…rerevealed Shakespeare to me. Now, speaking of forest and trees, what's even more mindblowing is to consider all those plays together, all the characters, (and the sonnets). What range! What scope! Who else? Melville's Moby Dick blew me away a bit like that too. And Joyce. And Goethe.
on ““Hamlet” by T. S. Eliot (1919)” ↗…black/white, right/wrong, good choice/bad choice etc. Fiction on the other hand captured just how murky this life can be. (While on this topic, I will add that the single novel to have most shaken my soul is Melville’s Moby Dick. That novel brought me great comfort while also shattering me in many ways, what a work it is)
on “Textual Healing: The Novel World of Bibliotherapy” ↗…comprehension. There's no question that Mark Twain is a great author representing America. But if I had to choose one mythic work in American literature that corresponds to Homer, I would choose Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'.
on “Who Is America's Homer?” ↗Melville's Moby Dick, Crockford's Javascript: the good parts, Vonnegut's short stories, Defoe's Adventures and Piracies of captain Singleton (not about the design pattern), Amsterdam in the 70s. Not a single new release though.
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗Melville's Moby Dick. It can be about adventure, about whaling, about the fellowship of man, about mortality... Intruder in the Dust, the best of William Faulkner's "young adult" novels. The short story collection Knight's…
on “The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)” ↗I think of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' as representing America.
on “Who Is America's Homer?” ↗Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" was a complete failure when published in 1851, and was essentially forgotten. It was rediscovered after WW1, becoming a great classic of American literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick#Later_reception
on “Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards” ↗…and Polynesian peoples for human flesh as food [1]; their reasoning being that pigs resemble humans, since they taste alike. This taste-based taxonomy is reminiscent of Ishmael's taxonomy of whales in Melville's Moby Dick [2]. It is known, and can indeed be readily proved by inspection, that everything tastes like chicken [3]. I thus propose a taste-based taxonomy of edible organisms, aiming at restoring the former prominent…
on “Agrivoltaics: Save solar plant land costs with sheep and agriculture” ↗The Krampus Whale appears to be a homophone chimera of the Grampus [1] in Melville's Moby Dick and the Krampus of Central European folklore [2]. Parent's final request is a clear reference to Coq [3]. I yield, mumbling something about lions and claws. [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/grampus…
on “Agrivoltaics: Save solar plant land costs with sheep and agriculture” ↗…(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henderson_Island_(Pitcairn_Isla...) is perhaps best known as the remote island where some of the survivors of the whaleship Essex arrived after their boat was rammed by a sperm whale. The story of the Essex is the inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick.
on “Google streetview world coverage” ↗A Melville bio might be sobering. Melville's Moby Dick was so widely ignored (at best) that he quit writing prose for decades before starting Billy Budd a few years before his death. By that time, Moby was out-of-print ... it wasn't a 'work of genius' or…
on “Ask HN: Books about people who persevered when no one else believed in them?” ↗…a key to understanding McCarthy's view of the world, being essentially tragic. I'd suggest there's a similar identification between the author and the Kid of Blood Meridian. What McCarthy thinks of Melville's Moby Dick I have not heard, but for the reader anyway, there's a rich cross-fertilization. Both of ideas -- being a pawn within a monstrous, doomed enterprise -- and of technique, as with the cryptic oracles of…
on “Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered” ↗…ago, but I was probably too young to fully understand it; more recently, I read Blood Meridian a few months ago for my book club. Few novels have had me think about them as much (Dostoevsky's Demons and Melville's Moby Dick come to mind). McCarthy was an absolute American treasure. Rest in peace. His poetic Blood Meridian epilogue really stuck with me: "In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of…
on “Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89” ↗The follow-up, when I asked "why do you think so": My statement that Captain Ahab is missing his left leg is based on common interpretations and summaries of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." However, upon reflection, I realize that specific textual evidence is crucial for such details. In the novel, Melville describes how Ahab's leg was taken by the whale, and Ahab uses a whalebone prosthesis…
on “Ahab's Leg Dilemma” ↗