Revenge is self-defeating. It will eat away at
you until there is nothing left. ― Chris Bradford
Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville is one of those classic books I should have read long ago but never got around to reading. It took me a couple of months to get through it—about as long as it would take to sail from Nantucket around Cape Horn—but I’m glad I finally read it.
The dominant figure in Moby-Dick is moody,
one-legged Captain Ahab, who is hell-bent on getting revenge on the white whale
who took one of his legs on a previous voyage. You get the idea he’s willing to
do whatever it takes to kill Moby-Dick—even if it means putting the lives of
everyone on the ship in danger.
First Mate Starbuck becomes convinced that
Ahab's obsession with Moby-Dick not only jeopardizes the investment of the
ship’s investors, but puts the lives of the entire crew at risk. So Starbuck
tries to reason with Ahab, without success. In Chapter 123, Starbuck considers
killing Ahab in an attempt to save everyone else, but decides against it. With
no one else on the ship willing to challenge Ahab, the captain continues in his
mad pursuit.
The tragic ending—everyone on the ship except
Ishmael dies—illustrates the inevitable result of Ahab’s insane quest for
revenge.
One unexpected thing I enjoyed was noticing
some of the expressions in the dialogue that are still used today. “Hay-Seeds”
(pg 37), a derogatory term for unsophisticated people from the country, is
still used in the US. Also: "chowder-headed people" (pg 74).
Chowderhead, meaning a stupid person, is an expression still used in New England.
So 170 years after Moby-Dick was published, some of America's slang expressions
from the 1840s are still around. I like that for some reason.
Caution: several chapters explore the science
of whales, whaling and whale ships, and those chapters get tedious.
