The Great American Novel?

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

The Great American Novel is the white whale of American literature, the elusive singular beast that would serve as not only the great bedrock of American literary pursuits but also say more about what America really is than any other book. It would be a book that any American might read and say, “this is us.”

Of course, it’s not possible for any such beast to exist and Herman Melville’s book, Moby Dick as wondrous in scope, metaphor, detail, and insight as it is does not exist either as the piece of work that would qualify for this exalted honor. 

Every book fails in its own way and Moby Dick is no exception. It’s not a very easy book to read. The part of the story that everybody thinks of as the story doesn’t happen until you’re two thirds of the way through it. Melville spends a lot of time telling the reader more about whales and whaling than most people would probably ever want to know. His book almost has the flavor of a travelogue at times and relies on a feeling of leisure to reach the reader. It was clearly written before TV or the internet or one of a million choices people have today to find out things. It anticipates that the reader will take every bit as much pleasure in being informed as he would in being entertained. 

It’s also strange to think of this book as the Great American Novel when so much of it takes places in exotic locales ranging around the earth. And even though this is not necessarily something that would keep it from living up to such a lofty billing it’s the choices Melville makes, the interests and obsessions he clearly works from which preclude it from telling American readers a whole lot about themselves. 

It is an American voyage with plenty of American seaman working with many other men of different races and origins. But the Pequod is not a petri dish. The ingrained prejudices you might rightfully expect from an American of those times are largely absent. Ishmael’s favorite human being before he even boards the ship is Queequeg, a South Pacific islander from a fictional island who couldn’t be more different than Ishmael in almost every outward respect. The book shows us very little of the problems and the prejudices between people that you might normally expect on dry land. As it turns out, sailors are practical people who are far more open-minded than most. 

Melville also has very little interest in the intimate lives of the crew. The many subplots which were surely a part of any story of men essentially trapped on a little ship for three years are something he does not get into. Their sex lives, their petty personal disagreements, their little loyalties and treacheries have very little to do with what happens. Ishmael’s personal drama if there was any, is essentially nonexistent. He exists as observer and informer. You have to wait until the epilogue before you even discover that he was on Ahab’s boat when Ahab finally gave up the ghost. 

So, if it doesn’t necessary qualify as the Great American Novel then what is it about Moby Dick that makes it so memorable, so utterly canonical? 

I believe it’s Melville’s unfailing sense of compassion. When he describes the hunt you can’t help but feel for the men as much as for the whale. Everything and everyone involved is a victim of a world they didn’t make and can’t control: whether it’s the commerce that drives the whaling business and the sailors’ need for money; the ship with a strict hierarchy that puts a man in charge who clearly isn’t capable and yet there is nothing anybody in the crew can do about it. Even Ahab himself in a rare moment of reflection admits he does not understand his destructive and irrational compulsion but is going to give himself up to it anyway. And then of course there is the blind need to conquer nature always operating as if nature was something that could or should be conquered, as though if it was somehow everyone could finally be at peace. And so, with the exception of the madman who captains the boat, very few people here really have anything in the way of choice.

The moral: Human beings thoughtlessly do terrible things and have terrible things done to them while the sea is vast, awesome, beautiful and indifferent. In the end, even the magnificent grandeur of the whale does not protect it from murder, exploitation, and rot. 

Huckleberry Finn, which Ernest Hemingway saw as foundational, is for my money a lot closer to the Great American Novel, something which everyone already knows will never exist. And every writer should be thankful that’s true and be like Ahab if he wants.