Melville's Writing

            One thing that always interests me about nineteenth century writers is the ways in which they tend to over-indulge how many words they use whenever explaining something. Whether it’s Hawthorne commenting on the irony of life or Melville subtly portraying a harsh hypocrisy that tainted every living soul during his time, I’ve noticed that few authors chose to be blunt; although Alcott was a good exception to this generalized critique. “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” (Melville 13). These details are hardly random but instead are meant to insight awe toward the obscurity and terror consummating such picturesque objects. The sublime feeling galvanizing this single work of art demonstrates how innate the emotion of fear and power hidden within our subconscious psyche continues to eddy boundlessly.

          Perhaps Hawthorne’s dear friend is merely foreshadowing an ineffably frightening and ambiguous event, which if be the case, a great white humped whale should suffice. Then again it may be something more prodigious like the unsolicited and surreptitiously constructed ideologies that prevailed during the beginning of our nation; an invisible propriety that remains ubiquitous even in the twenty-first century. “But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked… Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan” (Melville 62). In Victorian times people tried hard to stay irksomely pious, and they vehemently believed that anyone who strayed from the norms and codes of conduct were condemned to a life of eternal misery. Yet this didn’t stop Melville from charting a course to unveil the convoluted mask of a sinful society. He knew every “Christian” individual at one point or another was capable of lying or hypocrisy; better still, he knew people typically enjoyed part-taking in such squalid behavior. The employment of constant cynicism throughout Moby-Dick is greater than simply a tool to chisel out the mien of Ishmael. It was a vigorous, but light-hearted way to engage the readers to stop and contrast their own opinions about the world with Melville’s rugged character.

          In any case I thought it was rather interesting how Melville chose to enumerate several ideas without explicitly condemning them. That isn’t to say that Ishmael doesn’t outright denounce certain facets of his fleshly world, but that sometimes it is so entrenched with humorous harangue that one fails to take the observations seriously. Personally I prefer a blunter chastising of American society, but at least Melville’s sailor story involves no otiose scriveners (thank goodness).