Wow, talk about a long, verbose book. The story was interesting but moved very slowly. I did eventually come to appreciate the pace as a metaphor for the whaling journey – drawn out and mostly uneventful, but with bits of action scattered throughout.
I do feel like there was likely some deeper meaning that I missed in the book. I certainly caught bits of profound ideas, but most of the time I wasn’t in the mood to carefully parse the nineteenth-century prose, preferring to focus on the main story line instead. (The fact that I read the book off-and-on over a month and a half didn’t help, either.)
Now I’m eager to read In the Heart of the Sea, which is what made me decide to read Moby Dick in the first place.