Moby Dick or The Whale is a classic, and there's probably not much new I can say about it. I found interesting the parallels between it and Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, for instance. I always loved the scientific writing about Solaris, the planet, but I never knew that the interspersing of them into the story came from Melville, or apparently did. Another thing that surprised me about Moby Dick was the ecological angle. Although it was written a century and a half ago, Moby Dick discusses advanced issues such as extinction and overfishing.
What isn't mentioned is that whales are sentient beings worthy of protection. Melville's characterization of Moby Dick is one of personification; he gives the whale human motives and behaviors. Missing from the novel is the very sentience of whales in general, who are generalized as mere cattle, the catching of which is so simple that it deserves only the basest of descriptions. Only Moby Dick himself is intelligent enough to avoid capture, making him supernatural rather than sentient.
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