Response Journal Week 5 - Kalil

The Town-Ho’s Story introduces an interesting narrative strategy in Moby Dick. Rather than events unfolding in chronological order, Ishmael jumps ahead, to his later telling of this story on shore. This reintroduces the question of Ishmael as a character, which we have begun to largely ignore, in favor of analyzing Ahab, about whom we are given far more information. Harrison Hayford examines this to some extent in his essay “Loomings”. Though I found the vast majority of his ideas fairly problematic, he did give a very interesting account of Ishmael’s importance. His characterization of Ishmael as a “symphetic but perplexed observer”, fits in very nicely with my view of him as not quite corporeal in the way that Melville’s other characters are (658).
However, Hayford’s far reaching assertions about the novel are far more questionable. He suggests that Ishmael’s stated dislike of being a cook can be extrapolated to mean that Ishmael has a fundamental problem with subjecting others to his power. The continuation that this is also related to bodily injuries is simply implausible to me. Perhaps I’m not a good judge, not having finished the book, but this, as well as his analysis of the diction that Melville uses, do not appear to be well supported ideas (662-663). This is not always true, though. Hayford proposes the idea that Ishmael and Ahab treat every person as an unsolvable problem. When combined with his suggestion that the ocean is similarly an insoluble problem, this leads us back to our examination of the ocean as representing the infinite, and then to the concept of microcosms; each person has some part of the universe (or the ocean) within them. All of this is extremely Platonic, which has proven to be a major theme throughout our reading.
I also read several reviews of Moby Dick, including “A Primitive Formation of Profanity and Indecency”, and “Not Worth the Money Asked for It”. The former makes a point of praising what they refer to as “Moly-Dick” for its gripping narrative, claiming that “…the writer is half the time on his head, and the other half dancing a pirouette on one toe.” Of course, after Moly-Dick is introduced, the book becomes inane, vulgar and poorly written. Their primary point is that Melville’s writing is offensive, and thus he will go to hell, both for wasting his life, and for blasphemy (as will his publishers). The second review claims that Melville writes as though he is insane, and thus the novel is over priced. How did something so clearly hated become the Great American Novel?
Finally, I also read the review Gabriel read. I was somewhat concerned that someone who wrote, “The strongest point of the book is its ‘characters’”, is in any way qualified to criticize literature.