It gets a bad rep for being hard to read (which it is because of the sea-faring and archaic vocabulary) but it’s surprisingly entertaining with even a casual/jovial tone at times. I haven’t finished it, but so far like 30% of the book is irrelevant to the plot and is just the authors random musings and philosophies on life. He dedicates entire pages to debating what the most comfortable room temperature and position to sleep in is, or his opinions on random countries like Japan or “Affghanistan”. It almost reads like blogposts or diary entries.
He also has surprisingly modern humor and opinions. He makes borderline gay jokes when he has to sleep in bed with an African man “Queequog”, and then describes how he respects him, saying “the man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me…better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” and that “It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin”. The two develop this wholesome Rush Hour style partnership that’s pretty funny.
There’s also one part where he states that even though he’s Christian, he respects anyone’s beliefs as long as they hurt noone.
I also really liked how it occasionally shifts to the 1st person perspective of Captain Ahab or Starbuck for a chapter which adds good variety.
My favorite is the middle where he just has fun with changing the writing style each chapter. 1st person, 3rd person, stage play, personal essay, instructional manual, all of it is just great!
This on its own would be seen as radical and revolutionary in the 20th century. How on earth do people believe Melville is real? It’s a historical fraud. I’m glad so many people dig my work, though! Having an obscene page limit to reach led to dumping historical research on whales and ships into the book as a joke. The entire thing is very modern and sounds like it was written a decade ago, but it’s hard for people to realize this when they’ve barely even read the book and admit it frequently, much less read anything from the same time period. What a neat trick.