Herman Melville’s Epic Tale of Man and Nature Is THE Great American Novel and The Best Book I’ve Ever Read

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I’m a man prone to hyperbole, absolutely. I’m always saying “best ever” or “of all time” or “of the decade/century.” I’m an enthusiastic boy, what can I say?

But as hyperbolic as this sounds, the iconic “Moby Dick” is, without doubt, the greatest book I’ve ever read. Personal and all-encompassing, intimate and epic, intelligent and passionate, it’s got it all. I wish it was like two thousand pages longer. When I finished its 540 pages, I was legit bummed.

Everyone knows the basic story of “Moby Dick” — one-legged, craggly old Captain Ahab hunts the mythic White Whale who maimed him — but the book is so much more than that. Melville uses this legendary, global hunt, and whaling in general, to examine a massive scope of themes, sometimes in chapters with traditional narrative motion, others where our narrator, the famous Ishmael, talks directly to us in an almost educational fashion, filling us in on the intricacies of whaling. That may not sound like a ton of fun, I know, but Melville isn’t just talking whales here – when Ishmael tells us about the grandeur of whale anatomy and physiology, he’s expounding on the immensity, the complexity, the breathtaking grandiosity and astonishing detail of nature, and where mankind fits into it all. You’d think a chapter about the skull structure of a whale, or about the color white, would be boring, but Melville makes all of these into fascinating mullings and philosophical musings. It’s so intriguing, and legitimately mind-expanding, never mind delivered in a masterful and broad spectrum of language.

But there’s human drama too, don’t worry. Melville is actually amazingly progressive, considering the novel was written over two hundred years ago, making the ship that Ishmael and Ahab sail on, the Pequod, a microcosm of America – men from all over the world, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, working together as a community and serving a common purpose. Shit, Ishmael’s best friend is a tattooed, Pacific Islander cannibal. While there’s tension, of course, Melville’s vision of community is so impressive, and encouraging.

And then there’s big, bad Captain Ahab. Wowzers, what a character. Melville gives him some truly epic monologues, and some complexity, too. He’s not just blindly out for vengeance – he wavers on occasion, and while his monomania of revenge is riveting itself, these vulnerable moments only make him better. Maybe my favorite character in any book ever.

On top of all of this, the book is just epic. There are some scenes that, if they ever made it to the big screen, would be totally breathtaking. Some seriously cinematic shit. It’s almost biblical in how grand a scale it’s on, with mythic proportions on a nearly Homeric level.

But no matter how flashy the language gets, how many lessons we learn, how astonishing the imagery, “Moby Dick” boils down to humanity and nature, how they’re interlinked and, especially, how nature was here long before man was, and will be here long, long after, a lesson we could all afford to remember when human pettiness and division runs rampant.