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kramerica_intern t1_ix0y3ch wrote

Reply to comment by kiwilapple in [OC] Inspired by movie barcodes, I made some emotional barcodes for books by Campbell_MG

Very little of the book is them trying to kill Moby Dick. Most of it is a textbook about whales.

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fallllingman t1_ix20a59 wrote

Very little of it is a textbook about whales. Only about 4 chapters are like that, out of the 100+ total chapters. I mean, there’s also a lot about whaling, but the actual textbook parts are still pretty brief. It’s like 1/4th of the book, it’s not that much.

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kramerica_intern t1_ix22fam wrote

Yeah, I should have said whales and whaling. I don’t know the percentage of pages that are actually devoted to chasing Moby Dick but whatever it is it feels like a very small amount.

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fallllingman t1_ix2515k wrote

I mean do you expect 500 of 600 pages to be devoted to chasing a whale in hot pursuit? If we choose to call the whale God (and goodness knows Moby Dick is all about it’s symbolism), isn’t it proper that he makes an appearance only in the last thirty pages after we spend the novel doubting his existence? That’s not my personal interpretation of it, but the novel would be much worse if any more of it was devoted to chasing a whale. This is Herman Melville, not Robert Louis Stevenson.

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kramerica_intern t1_ix25vjc wrote

I didn’t think they’d be in hot pursuit the whole time but yeah, kinda. I picked up the book expecting to read about Ahab insanely chasing after Moby Dick. I didn’t expect entire chapters about objects found on a whaling vessel.

Though I suppose that’s what whaling might have been like. Lots of boredom before you finally get the intense rush of the chase.

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