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.
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
How did I miss this part? I read it And listened to it.
This part is especially funny in historical context because going around knocking off hats in that era would simply not be done because of how deliberately offensive and taboo it would be.
It would be like going around and slapping strangers in the face, spitting on them or giving them atomic wedgies.
It would be a sure fire way to start fights, duels or a full on riot.
Someone would probably be so offended they would shoot you and they’d probably get away with it because if a judge or jury heard that he was going around knocking people’s hats off they’d call it justifiable murder because only someone with absolutely no sense of morals or decency would do such an alarming thing and was obviously criminally insane.
Well, that is why he figured he had better go whaling, because if he didn’t, things were gonna go downhill.
Oh totally. It’s the 1800s equivalent of intrusive thoughts on the scale of randomly punching people in the face.
Today it’s practically a TikTok prank/reaction video because some people suck and need a paddlin’, but in the 1800s going around knocking people’s hats off is about as offensive as throwing poop.