Journal 2

Lucas Lorimer                                  Ch. 28-51 July 30(day written), 2019 Journal #2

            These were a battle. The toughest chapters of the book by far were these meditative ones. It seems like Melville goes on so many tangents to describe useless things like the thought processes of so many characters and this is where the amazingness of the book is really shown with the description and the way Melville can use words to portray every emotion.

            These are the chapters where the mysterious Ahab is revealed. He is shown to be a crazy captain who is obsessed with the white whale, Moby Dick. There are chapters devoted entirely to Ahab’s craziness like chapter 30 where Ahab is smoking his pipe when realization dawns on him that smoking is nice, and it is for happy people. He says he cannot be happy, so he flings his pipe into the ocean and vows never to smoke again. This crazy captain is criticized by some and by others his crazy nature inspires them to push harder.

            It is in these chapters that the readers get a sense for the mightiness of the whale. It is viewed as this monster that is the king of the sea. The whales are listed, and they are described in one of the longest chapters yet. Here we get more of an understanding for the hugeness of the sperm whale and the reason why he keeps being called a leviathan.

            Another thing I noticed is the way the book seems to be written in play form what with the formatting of dialogue and stage directions. This made me feel tenser and it was as if there was an action scene that is being played out. Everything seemed more fast paced and action-like. Melville’s style of writing really amazes me, maybe because I haven’t heard half of the fancy words he uses or because of the way he can put so much detail into action scenes that unless your paying really close attention or have done whaling can make the reader bored. (don’t want to be offensive but this book is really hard to understand at times.