Moby Dick is Not a Novel

An Anatomy of an Anatomy

By Jacob Shamsian

If Moby-Dick were a novel, it would be a bad one. Captain Ahab, who arrests the reader’s attention from Ishmael, the narrator, doesn’t appear until chapter 28 of 135, and there’s no way Melville has ever heard of the three-act structure.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a work of a different form, a rarer one: the anatomy. It’s an anatomy of two things – whales and Ahab’s diligence. The former is explored mostly biologically as a literal subject of dissection. The latter is a lens of exploring his fixedness, his evil, and his relationship with G-d and nature, among other topics. Disguised as the story of a crew hunting for a white whale while under the influence of a revenge-driven captain, Moby-Dick is actually a study of the meaning of whaling itself and whatever else Melville wants to talk about through his story.

Moby-Dick isn’t the only book in the anatomy form. There is also The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a study of the act of writing itself published in 1759, by Laurence Sterne. It pretends to be a biography of Shandy (who is fictional) but is filled with digressions about other subjects…