I first read Moby Dick; or The Whale over thirty years ago and I didn't understand it. I thought I was reading a sea adventure, like Westward Ho! or Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. In fact, it did start out like an adventure story but after twenty chapters or so, things began to get strange. I knew I was in deep water. It was rough, it seemed disjointed, there were lengthy passages that seemed like interruptions to the story, the language was odd and difficult, and often it was just downright bizarre. I plodded through it, some of it I liked, but I believe I was glad when it ended. I knew I was missing something and I understood that it was in me! It wasn't the book; it was manifestly a great book, but I hadn't the knowledge of literature or experience to understand it.

I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...

Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?

Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"

Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.

It's always dangerous to label a book as a "masterpiece": that word seems to scare away most readers and distances everyone from the substance of the book itself. Still, I'm going to say that this is the Greatest American Novel because I really think that it is--after having read it myself.

Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.

A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.

MD is beyond all rating, far beyond. This is simply the greatest work of American fiction and one of the finest pieces of literature ever written. Of course, that said, it is not a simple read, a mere entertainment. It can best be compared to reading Dante's "Divine Comedy" or Milton's "Paradise Lost." You've got to get ready to take your time, think carefully, study a lot, read slowly and with the intent to savor, be humble and receptive. The prose is daunting, but Shakespearean in its greatness. No one short of the great Willy Shakes himself has approached the brilliance of Melville's poetic style. The novel is a quas-allegorical epic tragedy, if that makes much sense to those who haven't read it yet, and you must come to it ready to put yourself through such a monumental task as grappling with it. Ahab is the great madman pursuing his blasphemous goal, Ishmael the gentle searcher caught up in the terror and attractions of that purpose, and Moby himself the great mystery of evil and God and nature, "the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them til they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung". Hey, I could go on and on about this, about symbols and meaning and fate and evil and God and revenge and madness and hope. But what's the point? There are so many facets to this book, from farce to fate, that it would take me days to cover it all. If you want to read something great, this is what you should take in hand. By the way, the "message" of MD is extremely important in our day and age, in my opinion. This is not just an empty academic read, but a profound exploration of the meaning of life and the broadest, deepest questions of moral and spiritual purpose. The same themes haunted Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Satre, Becket, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo -- the list could go on and on and on. But none of them reached as high as Melville in this work. You are welcome to write me to discuss MD any time, or to get pyshced up about reading it, or about unlocking some of its intricate and dense symbolism.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy is a compelling and intriguing novel. Instead of most conventional novels that rely on plot, it places its emphasis on getting certain points and ideas across to the reader. It is a book meant to make the reader think, not as a leisurely Sunday afternoon story. The story takes us through a series of tragic events, starting first, in contrast, with Jude as a young child full of hopes and dreams, the primary dream being to go to Christminster to become a learned fellow. We follow his life as he marries Arabella, a woman who fakes a pregnancy to get Jude to marry her. Because their marriage does not have the foundation of love, it quickly crumbles and Arabella leaves Jude to go to Australia.
Jude then decides to follow his old dreams and travels to Christminster, only to find it was little like what he had imagined. There he falls in love with his cousin Sue, who in order to spite Jude, marries the schoolmaster Phillotson. She despises their marriage, and soon asks her new husband to let her leave. After much contemplation, he consents, and Sue runs off with Jude. The two start a life together with Jude worshiping Sue and Sue constantly pushing Jude away. They will not commit to marriage, and live a life together looked down upon by all of society. After a while, they get a surprise from Arabella, saying she has a son that belongs to Jude, and that he will be coming to live with them. Father Time, as he was nicknamed, comes to live with them. He is a very depressed young soul, burdened by things way beyond his years. Sue and Jude have two more children out of wedlock, and constantly move from town to town to get away from the jeers of society.
Just as things are starting to look up, as Sue seems to finally love Jude, Father Time decides to take things into his own hands and hangs himself as well as the other two children. Sue, being unable to cope with the situation, leaves Jude and goes back to Phillotson, saying it is her duty. Jude, left alone, is then visited by the vivacious Arabella, who gets him drunk so he will consent to re-marry her. Their marriage, however, is simply one huge lie, and Jude, from depression and a loss of hope, becomes sick and finally dies in his misery.
The main topics looked at by Hardy seem to be about goals and marriage. Hardy clearly defines Jude's many goals, for instance his pursuit of knowledge and his pursuit to win the love of Sue, but just as St. Jude, the saint of hopeless causes, Jude is never able to achieve them. The idea seems to conclude that no matter what your goals are, you will never be able to attain them. This is a depressing thought, and though it may be true for some people, I believe it does not clearly express the true things that happen in people's lives. Most people, if they have a goal in sight, do achieve their goals, bringing themselves happiness.
Marriage is clearly looked down upon in this book. Hardy shows marriage between both Sue and Phillotson as well as Jude and Arabella as a trap of unhappiness. He then contrasts that unhappiness with the life of "true" happiness that Jude and Sue had together, out of wedlock. This idea, in my opinion, is absolutely false. Marriage is meant to be the union of two people who love each other so much that they are willing to commit their entire lives to each other. It is meant as a means for happiness and love to blossom. Hardy's demented idea of marriage is clearly false.
Even though some of the philosophies in this book tend to be skewed, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It made me think on an entirely different level. I could sympathize Jude's pain, and though it may not be a leisurely novel, it is a classic that I recommend any educated person should study.

Jude the Obcure is really a book about life. It involves Jude's search for happiness. Of course, he never quite achieves happiness because something is always in the way-preventing him from being happy. He starts out as a young lad living with his working-class aunt, dreaming that one day he may study at Christminster. The problem is as he grows he falls in love with a devilish girl named Arabella who tricks him into marrying her. Inevitably the marriage goes sour and he goes to Christminster, while she moves to Australia. Jude then meets his cousin Sue. He sets her up with Phillotson and they get married. Sue is then not happy and leaves to live with jude. As you can see this is really just a soap opera, but isn't life really just one big soap opera. Arabella then comes back to Jude with a son in Australia. Basically Jude feels responsibility to go back to Arabella and Sue goes back to Phillotson. Jude then dies soon after.

It's quite interesting how Hardy devises his plot. It's quite a dark novel, filled with every character's problems. Through this book we see that what society thinks is the right thing to do isn't always best for everyone. The climax of the book is a horrifying murder-suicide of Jude's children. This is no doubt a book that makes you think about the psychological aspect of life. It's a good read if you like the fact that none of the problems actually get resolved and trying to solve problems only makes new ones.

Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure at the height of his career. Does the book reflect his mastery? Or does it fall short of his capability? At the time of its publication, Jude (like Tess) received critical admonition from the public: The blatant sexuality and the unfulfilled/unheroic main character won over fanatics and made enemies of literary elites.

I picked up this book out of boredom, believing I'd put it down after a few pages. I enjoyed Tess from High School, but Jude for leisure? I was wrong: Hardy's poetic melancholy and rythmic cadence drew me in yet again. I was mesmerized by Jude, Arabella, and Sue. Though their conversations seem forced and some of their characterics unnatural, I felt sympathy for their deterioration and sadness. And in my feeling this, Hardy has accomplished a great poetic influence.

I really believe that Hardy could have written a greater Jude the Obscure if he was unhindered by the public. Though his true passion lay in poetry, he had much potential in prose. Too bad this was his last novel...