The Two Hundred and Twenty Two (or so) Moby Dicks

Herman Melville dedicated a whole book – round six hundred pages –to understand the mystery
behind this whale, Moby Dick. Bryant's postulates the form of the novel maybe a
result of list minute rush, an attempt to get things down to print before they
were ripened enough. The result is a book which is two books: Ishmael (a comic
adventure story) and Ahab (a Shakespearian Tragedy) and cut between them are a series of articles, musings and shorts which are not necessarily connected to main Narrative. But to say
"two stories" is to try and put a limit on Moby Dick, which you can't do.

Moby Dick is, up to a point, about man inability to understand Moby Dick – both of those stories are about the failure of conquest of man over something (nature, god, the world, what-have-you): What Ahab tries to do via physical means Ishmael tries to do via learning and philosophizing –
Ahab ants to kill the whale, Ishmael wants to understand him. They both fail. And likewise will fail any reader that tries to wrestle down Moby dick into an understandable form, into a lesson. There are not two Moby Dicks but infinite of them, one for every reader (and even more
for those who will read the novel a second or a third time). Perhaps more than any other novelists Melville grasped that the true purpose of the novel is to be, as Umberto Eco puts it "a machine for a generation of interpretations" (which means that an attempt to give it a final meaning is to miss the point of it) – for his readers he made a novel (also) about
novels, a novel about everything.