Just Finished Reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is widely considered as one of the classics of American literature, but I never had gotten around to reading it.  Until just recently, that is.  The main reason I think I waited for so long is that I felt that, due to the many references to this story that I've heard over the course of my life, I already had it figured out.  After all, isn't it pretty much common knowledge to most of us that Moby Dick is the name of the whale that mad, vengeful Captain Ahab seeks to confront and destroy, consequences be damned?  Well, I figured that there were a few details to fill in for this tale, and I set out to read it...

Herman Melville was obviously well acquainted with sailing on the high seas, especially with regard to the thriving whaling industry of the early-to-mid 19th century (Moby Dick was first published in 1851).  He devotes large sections of his narrative, told in the first person by a sailor named Ishmael, to describing whales in their biology and variety, whaleboats, and all of the tools and strategies of those involved in the killing of whales and the processing of their products (especially oil).  These passages were sometimes interesting and enlightening, but much of them left me lost as I knew little about sailing ships of the past and their parts and functions.  These "educational" sections were interspersed with the actual story of the Pequot, a whaling ship that Ishmael signs up with at Nantucket harbor on its doomed encounter with the giant whale.  The plot is largely driven from the viewpoint of various characters, most notably Ahab, his first mate Starbuck, the second mate Stubb, the Polynesian harpooneer Queequeg, and others...Ishmael himself is only involved in the pre-launch beginning of the story...and at its very end.  It was the dialogues and monologues of the characters, with their own peculiar regionalisms and slang, that I liked the most about Moby Dick. There is also a lot of introspection about people's motivations as well as an exploration into how people from completely different backgrounds relate to one another. 

As the whaling ship Pequot goes on its quest for Moby Dick...first through the North and then South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, through Dutch Indonesia to the Pacific, and eventually to the final encounter...there is a series of encounters with other whaling vessels, with Ahab and his crew touching base and exchanging information (called a "Gam") with the other boat's captain and crew.  These "Gams" take up another large part of the book.

The final dramatic battle between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick takes up a rather small section at the very end of the story...a surprise to me, since I had always pictured to myself that last struggle as THE BOOK. You may already know what ultimately happens, even if you never read it.  Still, I was a bit taken aback at what "went down" at the end...

Moby Dick is generally thought to be based on a true battle between a giant sperm whale and a whaler in the South Pacific around 1820.  Ron Howard, with undoubtedly his own creative embellishments, produced and directed a movie about this called In the Heart of the Sea, which is in theaters now.  I'm thinking about going to see it, if only to give me a better visual picture to all of the often very arcane technical information that Melville gave in Moby Dick...