It's Just a Bloody Whale

It's just a
Bloody Whale

In his article
Dimock rightly realizes the impossibility of interoperating Moby Dick (the
novel and the character/object) – "The whale indeed, has no match. It will
always resist the reader". The novel is not a riddle – for a riddle is
something that can be answered, can be understood. It is impossible to
"answer" Moby Dick because we are never sure what is the question (or
if there ever was one).
It was the great Umberto eco that
postulated that a novel is "a machine for generating interpretations"-
and therefore it was wrong for an author to give an explanation for his work,
because by doing so he would negate the purpose of the novel (Eco also said
that a novel should always be named after one of its characters in order to
provide the reader / critic more maneuvering mental space – another thing that
Melville follows). To follow that end Melville created not only a novel with no
single answer but a novel about something that has no single answer.
Both Ishmael and Ahab are
reflections of the reader – they both desire to put an end to Moby Dick:
Ishmael wants to explore and regionalize it, Ahab simply wants to destroy it.
But the two options are merely two sides of the same coin: to give an answer;
and, like the reader, they are both doomed to fail – because Moby Dick was
never meant to be understood, just to be reflected upon.