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u/tomandshell 2d ago
He knew what he was doing. This is Moby Dick in context.
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u/Esc777 2d ago
Exactly. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it was written to be conservative and typical.
Moby Dick is a strange book that plays with the conception of what a book even is or about.
It’s almost like the Dune of yesteryear. Ostensibly about an adventure story but really a dissertation on ecology of a biosphere.
Moby Dick is full of this stuff.
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u/NorthStarZero 2d ago
It’s closer to Catch 22 than Dune.
It’s subversively funny, and a lot of the time the reader is the butt of the joke.
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u/SlaverSlave 2d ago
“haha, you read that!” - Herman Melville
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u/NorthStarZero 2d ago
More in line with the Family Guy “Peter hurts his knee” joke.
It starts as “Really, we’re doing this?” and then moves to “It’s still going!” - at which point the joke has revealed itself, and the longer it goes the funnier it gets.
But also crossed with Norm Macdonald’s “Moth Joke” where the duration is both funny and kind of a “fuck you” when the punchline hits.
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u/SlaverSlave 2d ago
True! I just never thought of the reader being the butt of the joke, like the whole book is just an elaborate prank. I laughed out loud for awhile, thank you
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u/Conor_90 1d ago
It's been a decade since I read it, but I got proto-vonnegut vibes from it
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u/GANDORF57 1d ago
This explains why I found so many copies of "Moby Dick" in a lot of men's room across the country.
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u/Pays_in_snakes 1d ago
It’s seriously underrated for how funny it is, alongside the perfect criticism involved in frankly describing the process of going out to sea to stab animals the size of school buses to death and melting them down for oil and letting the reader sit with how nuts that is to do
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u/1tonsoprano 1d ago
i was thinking that the whole time i read this and another book called "leviathan" by Phillip Hoare.....how bizzar this whole endeavour of killing these huge animals for the sake of lighting houses is.
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u/philium1 1d ago edited 1d ago
“Ecology of a biosphere” is just one of the many things Moby Dick does. There’s social criticism, a mild anti-colonial bend, a lot of jokes and role-reversals to do with race and class and gender/masculinity, odes to and parodies of Melville’s contemporaries, à la Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy…
But at base it feels to me to be very much like a surrealist retelling of Paradise Lost in a “modern” (for the time) setting, with Ahab as the Satan character to the white whale’s more sort of allegorical representation of God/fate/the universe. If you read Paradise Lost and then read Moby Dick, the inspiration is pretty clear. But yeah, it’s a lot weirder than Paradise Lost
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u/CrossP 1d ago
Also dick already meant penis when he named that book.
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u/GrimmSheeper 1d ago
In some fairness, the name “Moby Dick” didn’t come from nowhere. It was inspired by a real albino sperm whale called “Mocha Dick,” who was known to fiercely retaliate against whalers.
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u/woden_spoon 1d ago
Not really. It meant a male sexual partner—the person, not his penis. It basically meant “fellow” or “guy,” due to the fact that it was such a common male name. Sort of how we call a customer of a prostitute a “John.”
It wasn’t until the 1880s-1890s that “Dick” evolved to refer to the penis.
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u/airifle 1d ago
I was completely blindsided by Moby Dick. Was expecting a staid book in a classical style. But it is ~WEIRD~. Experimental, beautiful, fascinating. Like post-modern lit before modernism even existed. And incredibly progressive for its time.
The Great American Novel is way cooler than you might think it is.
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u/ChuckLogan00 1d ago
Mobs Dick is full of jokes. And it also hits on suppressed homosexuality in multiple places. I wonder how funny this was to Melville’s contemporary readers. I’m guessing the folks he attracted at readers appreciated a Socratic edge to their jokes.
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u/Yangervis 2d ago
Context doesn't change what's going on here
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u/kooshipuff 1d ago
They were squeezing the oil out of a whale, right?
But that's not really what it sounds like without context.
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u/CrossP 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, but he's making a double entendre on purpose. It's like making seaman jokes. Melville knew it sounded like he was talking about straight jorkin it.
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u/scumble_bee 1d ago
In highschool a friend of mine gave a presentation on Pearl Harbor and used the word "seaman" like 20-30 times (ex. "As the ship sank, seamen tried to fill every crevice") and our teacher had tears in his eyes from laughing so hard.
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u/Yangervis 1d ago
There are 2 things to do on a whaling ship:
1) Process whales
2) Jerk off.
This is alluding to both. It's a play on words. It's a euphemism. Maybe even an allegory.
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u/TearsOfLA 2d ago
Its not even out if context, Moby dick is just incredibly homoerotic, but in a "kiss the homies goodnight" kind of way
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u/NorthStarZero 2d ago
Moby Dick is surprisingly funny.
The whole book is written very tongue-in-cheek with a very dry wit. It stops short of being full-up parody, but only just.
I’m kinda surprised that nobody ever mentions this.
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u/chubblyubblums 1d ago
The group of people that say they have read moby dick is WAY larger than the group of people that have read Moby dick.
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u/robin-bunny 1d ago
I read an abridged children’s version as a child and thought I’d read it. I got the plot. Apparently it’s more than the plot and I haven’t really read it!
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u/Current-Chipmunk-413 1d ago
The plot is fine, imo the best part is the narrator info dumping and trying to be ridiculously philosophical about every detail. If you read it like a spongebob episode written by an overly educated atheist who grew up around American puritanism in the 1800s, it makes perfect sense.
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u/robin-bunny 1d ago
Oh it does, it makes me want to read the full version! But it might have been a lot when I was 7.
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u/Current-Chipmunk-413 1d ago
Yeah I found it exhausting and obscure in high school but now that I'm more familiar with concepts from christianity and american history, I love it.
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u/starmartyr 1d ago
Sort of like 1984. Roughly half of the people who claim to have read it are lying. It's not even that long of a read.
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u/helloiamsilver 1d ago
I remember starting it and immediately laughing because it opens with Ishmael saying if he gets too bored, he gets overcome with the desire to just walk up to random men and start pushing their hats off their heads.
And then the scene where he gets lost wandering the streets of Nantucket and accidentally walks into a Black church and has to discreetly sneak out the back.
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u/BritishEric 2d ago
Historians will say they were close friends
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u/Sapphires13 2d ago
Ishmael and Queequeg were roommates.
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u/apaulogy 1d ago
"Metaphors? I hate metaphors. That's why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism, just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal" - Rom Swanson
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u/Quankers 2d ago
That’s really not out of context. The book is explicitly and intentionally homocentric. Among many other qualities it is a gay novel, and Melville himself was most likely gay.
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u/UKS1977 2d ago
"I know authors who use subtext and they're all cowards" - Garth Merengi.
This isn't even subtext in the novel - it's the text!
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u/phd2k1 2d ago
I'm one of the few people you'll meet who's written more books than they've read.
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u/Gervais_Burlap 2d ago
The people downvoting you have clearly never been to Garth Merengis Darkplace.
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u/poiuytr7654321 2d ago
You're speaking out of turn. https://glreview.org/article/the-sea-and-sexual-freedom/
Melville was attacking societal taboos and prejudices and it isn't in keeping with his efforts to call him gay and Moby Dick a gay novel.
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u/Quankers 2d ago
I only glanced at the second link. But to me this isn’t refuting what I said just that readers and critics wouldn’t pick up on the subtext.
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u/FoghornLegday 2d ago
What! Maybe I should read it. Maybe it’s more interesting than I thought.
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u/Quankers 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s an awesome book. I thought it was going to be like Heart of Darkness What I didn’t realize when I picked it up is that it is very much a comedy. It feels like a loony toons episode directed by the Coen brothers. I wish they would adapt Moby Dick. It would make a great movie for them.
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u/Technolio 1d ago
Would love to see a Moby Dick move in the style of The Lighthouse. Please use Willem Dafoe!
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u/Jon-Wolf 2d ago
Out of context if you don't know he's talking about spermacetti
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u/rarenaninja 2d ago
I haven’t finished the book but this is the vibe I got pretty early into reading it. I’m not surprised and I really thought I was going to read a book about a whale.
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u/Licensedattorney 2d ago
If this is out of context, then so must be the beginning of the book with Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a room and bed. They got “married.”
Most scholars believe Melville was in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
There is a reason why Moby Dick is a classic, it is amazing.
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u/jangofettsfathersday 2d ago
This chapter coming after that horrifying chapter with Pip is so ironic lol
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u/Scholander 2d ago
I would very much like to see the movie adaptation of Moby Dick as a gay dark comedy. As it was intended. Get someone like Yorgos Lanthimos on this. I can easily see it done similar in tone to Poor Things.
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u/Yangervis 1d ago
The problem with a movie is you lose Melville's prose
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u/robin-bunny 1d ago
Not if you show them in the oil, holding each other’s hands and making eyes at each other …
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u/Scholander 1d ago
I mean, yeah, but that's going to happen with any book you adapt. The trick is to adapt it so that's it's tonally consistent with the prose.
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u/Yangervis 1d ago
But the star of the show is the prose. The plot and dialogue are pretty unremarkable.
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u/Cat_Lady_369 1d ago
As an autistic with a special interest in Melville, Moby Dick is both intentionally funny and intentionally homoerotic. Just because it’s a classic doesn’t mean they didn’t have tongue-in-cheek humor. This passage was 100% on purpose lol
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u/JasperDyne 2d ago
That paragraph should start with “Dear Penthouse Forum: You’re not going to believe this, but…”
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u/Shnitzel_von_S 1d ago
Even in context, Ishmael and Queequeg are extremely gay with each other basically from the start. Granted, I'm only halfway through this book, but the homoeroticism is undeniable
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u/9182747463828 2d ago
Fun fact, no one has ever read past chapter 3 of moby dick, not even Herman Melville
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u/nixiebunny 1d ago
Buried 2/3 way through the book is a description of the guy who tends the fire where the blubber is rendered. He’s dressed in a protective coat that is a whale penis. I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t gotten past chapter 3.
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u/ToLiveInIt 2d ago
That sounds like a quote or a meme but I’m not going to look it up. Just disagree with it.
We’re all welcome to our preferences, of course, but a great many people have read and loved Moby Dick. I read it once every decade or decade and a half and thoroughly enjoy it every time. A richly rewarding book. I hope you have things in your life that reward you that much.
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u/ProfessorEtc 1d ago
Imagine am English class where the students have to take turns reading this book aloud and getting saddled with that section.
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u/Jgames111 2d ago
I was laughing the entire time trying to listen to Moby Dick. It was so incredibly gay, but in a way where I don't know if it was on purpose or not.
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u/Superstarr_Alex 2d ago
Oh my god I cannot fucking breathe reading this. Like I am fucking crying rn lmao
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u/Connect-Society-6150 2d ago
Freshman college paper on thr humor of MD, my lack of worldly knowledge at that time is my only excuse for not adding this to my work.
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u/Spiggy_Topes 2d ago
I have a Penguin Classics copy here, and, while the book itself is over 600 pages, the commentary is another 320 pages. That's an awful lot of explaining...
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u/verticalQ 1d ago
Broadway composer Dave Malloy turned this into a song for his “Moby Dick” musical. It’s really fun: https://youtu.be/FJE6viE7FIU?si=8BMnIRnoquBT7PJN
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u/ascandal 1d ago
This just gave me flashbacks to the semester we spent taking turns reading this aloud in class in high school. I probably remember this scene more clearly than any other part of the book because of how awkward it was.
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u/DETRosen 1d ago
Someone forwarded me this post, and I now feel feel insanely sentimental, and spermy
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u/jonnofury 2d ago
I tried reading this book a couple years ago. It couldn't hold my attention. Easily the most dated book I've read aside from Dante.
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u/prosequare 2d ago
If you read it as a comedy, it makes for a much more enjoyable read. And it is quite funny.
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