MOBY DICK: A Long Book with Themes
By Tylis Chipwich
English 247—Professor Thrasher
Moby-Dick by the great author Mr. Herman Melville, is a very good book and one that is
very important to our understanding of English or American literature, depending on
which that very great author, Melville, was. In it I find two themes, those of bigness and
whiteness.
The first theme, bigness, is a theme that I find in Herman Melville’s exceptional
masterpiece, Moby-Dick, which was, incidentally, written by non other than Mr. Melville
himself. This means, by simple logic, that many things in Moby-Dick are bug, or, at the
very least, great in bigness. The book itself is very big, and long, and hard to read, and
maybe a little too hard for an introductory class, Professor Thrasher.
The whale Moby-Dick itself, the very whale that lends its name, “Moby-Dick,” to
the title of this grand work of literature, Moby-Dick, must have been very big indeed, at
least when compared to most smaller objects, any one of which Melville could have
chosen to write about. Note, however, that he chose to write about the whale. Do not
underestimate the significance of this authorly decision.
At any rate, I cannot be certain exactly how big Melville’s choice subject was, but
I would estimate it to have been approximately whale-sized, even by modern standards
with which Melville would not have been familiar at the time. Do not neglect to realize
that even Captain Ahab was, I’m sure, very big and scary-looking, all whales aside.
Another theme explored in Melville’s Moby-Dick, the aforementioned book
which Herman Melville wrote at a critical time during the span of his writing career, is
whiteness. Thus, many things in the book are white, white in hue, or white-hued. Mr.
Melville was himself, I believe, a white man—in race. And we know for a fact that the
whale called Moby-Dick was white as well—in color terms—for Melville refers to it as
“the whale,” “that great white whale,” and “it” repeatedly in the book. For
documentation, I have dog-eared the pages of the book on which these citations appear.
In conclusion, overall, and to sum up, it seems that many things in that particular
novelization of Mr. Herman Melville’s thoughts known as Moby-Dick, very likely the
greatest book Melville ever wrote about whales or related subject matter, are big and
white. Perhaps Mr. Melville, being big and white as he was, understood the problems of
being big and white, and used the big white whale as a metaphorical construct for
himself, or for the bigness and whiteness that some have accrued to him.
(From A Harvard Education in a Book, pgs 95-95)