“I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.”

The structure of Moby-Dick is remarked on often enough, and certainly it’s not traditional. Like Melville’s earlier books, Moby-Dick is divided into a great number of very short chapters. Some of these chapters propel the narrative, others are doing something else. Of those that propel the narrative, some focus on life on the Pequod, some on the chase for Moby-Dick himself, so there is even a further division of the story. Of those that do something else, many function as set pieces, others as character studies, and still others as the symptoms of James Wood’s famous diagnosis of “hysterical realism.”

That phrase kept coming back to me during this particular reading of Moby-Dick, because it seemed Ishmael himself was almost pressing it on me. He is quite clear about what he is doing, and why you should not skip the Cetology chapter, or any of the other ones that might seem bizarre or boring. They are neither; they are brilliant.

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.

Now here we have two important facets of Ishmael’s narration: the constant need to classify and explain the ultimately chaotic, and the regular appeal to authority. First, on chaos.

Ishmael has clearly determined before setting down his famous first line that the only way to tell a story is to tell the whole of it. It can’t be done in an organized fashion, because life itself is completely disorganized.

What then remains? Nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable.

Note that “practicable”; Ishmael is nothing if not a good, solid New Englander (New Yorker though he may be; Melville’s whole America is practically New England in some way). We must simply latch on, grab the whole thing, spread our arms as wide as we can to take in whatever will fit, and funnel it through a voice bursting with personality and enthusiasm (and genius alliteration and allusion).

Not only is this the only way Ishmael believes a story can be told, I would say (sweepingly, again), that this is the only way Melville believes a story can be told. This led to the mess of Mardi but also all the smaller wonders of Redburn and White-Jacket, not to mention Typee and Omoo. The short chapters are the key to packing in this much information; they stretch the bounds of the novel as a form just a bit too much for some people, I suppose, but if your idea of the novel has room to stretch this is a wonderful way to do it. And one thing that makes each little one a gem is that Ishmael doesn’t leave you hanging to wonder how each little bit and piece of a whale or the apparatus of a whaler matters in the bigger picture. He tells you; he makes his own sweeping comparisons and pronouncements about man and the human condition, and while you may not be able to plumb the fullness of Moby-Dick so easily it’s impossible not to see a huge mass of meaning wrapping up these tiny chapters like a thick blanket of blubber.

I don’t want to imply that Ishmael’s narration is heavy-handed in this way; he’s not beating the reader over the head with the obvious. He’s just amazingly enthusiastic, about nearly everything. He more than recognizes the great terribleness of the world, but he also finds in it great joy. This is another place, I suppose, where you either will or won’t feel an affinity for the man. But if you do you will follow him through the crests and troughs of wonder and emotion with ease.

Another affinity that’s probably necessary to embrace Ishmael and be a “good reader” of Melville is a love of learning. Ishmael wants to know as much as he can know; his appeals to authority are meant to bolster faith in his own narration but just as much serve to show how much research he wants to do and how much he wants to know. He does all in his power to explore the whale inside and out, the process of whaling in all its steps, and everything else he comes into contact with. Readers of Moby-Dick must do the same, learning about the sperm whale from head to tail, blanket to case, and those who simply enjoy such quantities of new and strangely interesting information will feel some of their narrator’s enthusiasm rubbing off before long.