"Moby Dick" (Longman Critical Readers) [Paperback]

This is an excellent new edition of Moby Dick, with detailed informational notes and "double text," showing and explaining the differences between the American and British versions of MD. There are also very helpful diagrams and prints, illucidating some of the nonfiction/informational chapters. Excellent text for college students studying at the upper levels.

The two stars are for this edition, not the contents, of course.

Edition: A LONGMAN CRITICAL EDITION, Edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer

1. The major problem with this edition is the small print. When I received the book and started to read, it appeared to me that I am going to need a pair of reading glasses. However, this was not the case. Other people who looked at it agreed with me that the print is extremely small and reading is an unpleasant experience.

2. Apart from the print size, the color of the letters is grey, not really black - which makes things even worse.

3. The explanatory notes are fine, but because these notes are located at the end of the book, it is impractical to read these explanations while reading the book. I suggest to the editors to place the explanatory notes at the bottom of each referred page.

One of the challenges many readers find in "enjoying" Moby Dick is the plethora of knowledge about the whaling industry that Melville provides through the voice or Ishmael. Those chapters, I readily admit, will only be enjoyable to people to appreciate "lore" as such, or who relish Ishmael's sarcastic side-comments about the foibles of humanity. Another challenge is the tongue-in-cheek science of "cetology" as expounded by Ishmael. The reader has to know enough current science to recognize when Melville is playing fast and loose with the scientific method, satirizing the science of his own day. But in chapters 104 and 105, science-minded readers would be wise to pay close attention to Mr. Ishmael, and to remember that Moby Dick was published in 1851! Ishmael expounds - almost as if it were self-evident - the basic Darwinian theory of 'descent with modification'! He also ASSUMES deep time - a geological scale of time involving millions of years, a necessary first step toward understanding evolution. He presents fairly accurate notions of the role of glaciers! He actually posits the "snowball earth" hypothesis, that is, that the whole planet was once locked in a ice age! This self-educated seaman was no mean scientist! And since we can assume that anything Ishmael 'knew' and cared about, Melville also knew and thought about, it's no wonder that Herman Melville found himself on the brink of abandoning his Christian beliefs.

Ishmael is the main character in the novel, you know, the one who sets the pace and calls the tune. It's Ishmael who goes questing; Ahab's quest is just a bright projection of Ishmael's, a particularly fantastic shadow puppet on the wall of Ishmael's cave. It's mostly Ishmael to tells us what Ahab is all about, though betimes Melville lets Ahab rage in his own plenipotent Shakespearean dialect. It's Ishmael who leads us, in the reverse of Dante, to paradisal seas and proper Christian faith first, then to the purgatory of the butchery, and then the depths of hellish annihilation. If I ever had to teach a high school English class - an honor I don't aspire to - I'd tell the little blighters straight off that in any novel with a first-person narrator, that's the chap to watch. Finally, it's Ishmael who LEARNS. In his first encounter with Queequeg, he learns human relativity. Through all the pages and chapters detailing the nature of the whale and of whaling, he learns and learns, and shares his learning in his ever-bemused, ironic style. Of course, he learns eventually that HE is the sole survivor of his own quest. And don't be fooled for a moment that he hasn't learned the metaphysical truth that he set out to learn in the symbolic guise of the White Whale...

Moby Dick is a book about the dread Melville felt at his increasing religious uncertainty, his fear of the infinite, and particularly of an infinite that might well be empty, that might be as void as the color white. He says as much in the key chapter 42, 'The Whiteness of the Whale': "...a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink..."

But Moby Dick is also a rollickingly funny book, ripping anything it touches with its sarcasm and satire. If one chapter seems wordy, dear reader, keep your eyes open and you'll be rewarded by a side-splitter in a few pages. Melville perhaps still wrote under the illusion that he could sell profundity to the parlor readership of Victorian America; a good thing for us, since he gave us full measure of adventure, of humor, and of personal anguish all in one unforgettable book. What each reader notices as she/he reads Moby Dick will be as different as what each hiker sees while descending into the Grand Canyon. I've read it three times now, decades apart; this time, with my own metaphysical quests all logged, I found it more hilarious, more picturesque, more a grand display of virtuosic wordsmithing than I recalled. Anyone who finds Moby Dick boring isn't worth his/her hard tack biscuit.