/lit/ - Literature

32

Melville

Moby-Dick

Kind of boring, but what can I say? The Whale is king.

You've already read Moby-Dick, right, /lit/?

I'll bet most of you faggots who make "books for this feel" threads have never read Moby-Dick. This is the book for your feel you fucking shitters. Hate, frustration, loneliness, all-consuming jealousy--whatever you've ever felt, you'll find it in this book, so stop shitting up /lit/ and go read it.

How can you post on this board and be an English-language reader and not have read Moby-Dick? How can you deny yourself the experience of this masterpiece? This treatise of the human spirit, this study of man and the universe, this scouring of Heaven and Hell, all written in a language that God himself could worthily have spoken?

Why the FUCK haven't you read Moby-Dick yet?

>>12083134
This. And Starbuck literally warns him about this.

>"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

If we consider Moby-Dick as a mere animal, then it's not like some sort of human who's committed a crime. It's an expression of the universe, and of the God who controls the universe. What Ahab really wants is vengeance on God. He sees the whale as merely God's agent in crippling him, and seeks to hurt God by destroying his agent. And one might say he pays the price for the "blasphemy" that Starbuck accuses him of.

Why isn't Moby-Dick on this list, when it's essential reading for every American?

>>11540419
>Asking they're good or evil is like asking if a whale is good or evil.

Well about that...

OP you should read Moby-Dick. It will get you to love great literature.

Reminder that Moby-Dick is the ultimate pleb filter for English-speaking readers. If you cannot appreciate this masterpiece, you have no business on /lit/.

Have I got a book for you...

Obligatory Moby-Dick post

>>9602846
I was posting earlier in the thread, but I've actually had cause to think about it some more, and it occurs to me that being a great writer may require being timeless AND timely.

Take Moby-Dick, for example. It is in part an extremely detailed depiction of an industry that hasn't existed for more than a century now. You can read Moby-Dick and more or less learn everything worth knowing about the practice of hunting whales for whale oil. It's a snapshot of a vanished world, one which isn't terribly relevant to most of its readers today.

On the other hand, in the midst of depicting whaling, it also, of course, manages to muse about God, the universe, the transcendent, madness, genius, and a huge chunk of the Western Canon. The reason we read it today is because it manages to take something specific and of its time and universalize it. It's both of its own time and beyond it, and maybe that's the key.

Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale,
In his ocean home will be
A Giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless Sea.