Originality is impossible and every story has already been told a thousand times. Trying to be original is a recipe for failure, because all you'll end up doing is coming up with some arbitrary and meaningless twist on the old cliches. But every once in a very long while, somebody actually writes something completely different, something that breaks all the rules and gets away with it.

“Moby-Dick” is such a book. You might have been told that it's almost unreadable, that it has an entire chapter devoted solely to the different symbolic meanings of the color white. Whoever told you that was sugar-coating it. Not only is there an entire chapter on the color white, there is also an entire chapter on the design of a whaling boat, an entire chapter on the different types of whale, an entire chapter on the anatomy of the sperm whale, an entire chapter on the process of butchering a whale. One whole chapter is spent comparing the relative merits of two severed whale heads, one on the port bow and one on the starboard, to determine which of the two is more philosophical and which philosophy it best exemplifies. (The sperm whale is apparently a Platonist.)

Some of the chapters are written as if they were plays. In some of the chapters, something actually happens that advances the plot, but not in most of them. In fully two-thirds of the chapters, the plot does not move forward even a little.

Plus, the main character, who is also the narrator, virtually disappears from the book almost as soon as the ship sets sail, and never does anything else of any importance until the very last paragraph. (There's a reason for this, and quite a clever one. As soon as Captain Ahab comes on the scene, Ishmael seems to fade away, as if his individual will had been blotted out. Only Ahab remains in view.)

No book written with such a dramatic disregard for the conventions of storytelling could ever succeed. And this book did not- it actually destroyed Melville's literary career. Yet it is, for all of that, a weird and beautiful and compelling book that I read from beginning to end in just a few days. It is now one of my all-time favorite books. I cannot easily explain that fact, but it is still the case. The story of Ahab is awe-inspiring- a man of true greatness, larger than life, a man capable of inspiring others to follow him into Hell. And that's exactly where he intends to take them, driven along by his blasphemous pride.

But Ahab himself would reject this charge, in words as over the top as the man himself:

“Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I would strike the sun if it insulted me!”