Oh the Places he'll Go To

When Chase writes that Melville's
purpose with Moby Dick was "the single epic statement about America"
seems to miss entirely the notion of ever-sought-after "Great American
Novel" – there is no, and there can never be a single Great American
Novel. It is a title, one that is passed on from generation to generation, each
one finding his proper representation. Just as America, of the first modern
democracies, chooses its rulers so it chooses its novels.
Moby
Dick was The Great American Novel when it came out, but ever since then the
crown has been passed down – from Moby Dick to Huckleberry Finn,
to The Great Gatsby, to The Grapes of Wrath, to On The Road,
to Catch 22 to Infinite Jest (with probable contender for the
crown today in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom). This is a country that, in 50 years, moved
from unwillingness to give its minorities some of its basic rights to electing
on of them as a president; only a country open to such changes can be Moby
Dick one decade Huckleberry Finn the next – from ignoring the
problem of minority rights to making it the center of the story.
Think
of Moby Dick as a family photo in an album – it is a frozen moment in time, a
realization of the zeitgeist. But for all its importance to the family it is
still just one photo, no matter how beautiful or seminal the moment it captures
– sometimes soon they will turn the page and will show a new photo, and a new
zeitgeist.