Moby Dick - An American Mess(terpiece)

For the last year, I have done battle with the great American literary Leviathan: Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The journey has been a long and strange one, much like the Pequod's tale, often filled with wild chases, more often floating through tedious doldrums, and occasionally transcending the reading experience altogether. I would liken this novel to a huge mansion, or a museum with an ambiguous title, like the Smithsonian. The chapters are like the rooms of this museum; some are huge corridors, others are tiny closets. Some of these rooms contain fascinating objects which cause you to slowly stroll through, mouth agape. Others find you staring at your feet, scuffing your way through the flotsam and jetsom of boredom.
What Melville could have used in this whole process of creating Moby Dick was an editor. There are large chapters which go on and on about ... "The Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales"? That is the title of one of the "doldrum" chapters, as I would call them. Though, when I consider it, an editor, while he may have been able to trim some of the excess blubber, may have also hacked away some of the best chunks of writing I have ever read because much of it does not directly relate to the chase of the whale.
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expence but his own... That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke... Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeve of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."- Chapter 49, "The Hyena"
After a season aboard Melville's chaotic ark, I learned to push through the bewildering rabbit trails and footnotes that litter the architecture of this great house, and content myself with the richness of the language. While I don't fall in with the literary camp that deigns this the "Great American Novel," I have enjoyed the voyage immensely.