Moby-Dick is, to some extent, a 600-page penis joke without a punchline -- unless being rammed to death by a massive creature that roughly resembles a detached, mobile, and sentient phallus counts as a punchline. Of humor, though, there is none at the end. Ishmael himself is a superior punster, but he is largely absent from the ending -- until his obligatory appearance in the epilogue. One wonders: was Melville himself aware of how phallic and, at times, homoerotic the imagery in the novel is? Perhaps some of it can be chalked up to the times: the fact that homophobia was generally unknown (because homosexual behavior was so thoroughly closeted as to be out of public scrutiny, and because, as a result of the previous fact and because of practical necessity, men could, for instance, cuddle up together in the same bed with no hint of impropriety) and therefore no one would accuse the narrative of anything untowardly.
If the phallic joke is a locker-room staple, then the Pequod is something like the ultimate locker-room: thirty men alone together for a voyage potentially spanning years with no literal female presence to balance things out, engaged in the manly pursuit of subduing nature and, in essence, subverting it to human ends. The men deal in sperm oil, for God's sake! An entire chapter is devoted to the "squeezing" of the sperm and the immense satisfaction to be had from doing so with your bosom companions -- all of whom are male. The closest thing to female companionship during the voyage is the saving grace of the Rachel, wandering about toward the novel's end and searching out -- literally and figuratively -- her lost children. She finds only Ishmael -- whose namesake was famously abandoned by his father. If there is a homosexual undercurrent to the novel, it's a rather abysmal one. This is a novel of men doing manly things, but doing them as though they live in a world in which there are no women. It's roughly an opposite masculine inversion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's radical feminist utopia imagined some fifty years later in Herland. Well, whatever: Ishmael seems to be having a good time.
And Ishmael is, in a way, the novel's mainstay and security but also its great flaw. He holds everything together, but he doesn't quite fit in a way, and his curious absence at the end diminishes the cohesiveness of the narrative somewhat. The novel is messy and flawed, as perhaps all great works of literature must be. (Show me something that is perfect, note for note, beginning to end, that is longer than a sonnet. I don't think you can.) At times, it is even somewhat dull and unedifying. But it is appropriately vast, meaningfully broad, expansive by design and by necessity. It is about the very concept of greatness -- not greatness as in Alexander or Gatsby, not greatness as in a full measure of admirability in character or quality, but greatness as a measurement of sheer significance, the ability to carry meaning. Nothing else quite like it has ever been accomplished.
Like that other great American measure of greatness -- The Great Gatsby -- the question is whether the protagonist is essentially the narrator or that other character whom the narrator fixates upon. In other words, are these novels about Ishmael/Nick Carraway, or are they about Gatsby/Ahab? Gatsby and Ahab are the characters whose obsessions (the white whale/Daisy -- what's the difference?) dominate the stories and drive the narratives, but perhaps more significant is the fact that the narrators find significance in their obsessions. In other words, if a tree falls in the forest .... Had Ishmael not survived to tell the tale, there would be no tale to tell. Had Nick not puzzled at length over the inscrutability of his summer acquaintance, that novel would be bust as well. Every story requires a storyteller. It has to be one of the primal laws associated with the articulation of human speech. "I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said ...." As for Ahab, his apostrophe to the head of the decapitated whale in Chapter 70 is both sublime and surreal -- but also comic, gross, and revolting. It stands out as a singular episode in American literary history. Once Ahab does wrest the narrative from the narrator himself, he does so forcefully. The forging of his harpoon, the deliberate destruction of the quadrant, his taking up of little Pip -- these things come one after another toward the end of the novel, reminding us that Ahab's obsession is what drives the novel.
And, finally, regarding the whale, there comes a development that Melville might never have considered, which is that the modern audience might be prone to sympathize more with the poor, maligned whale than with those who would destroy it. The power of the novel, though, can only be enforced by this, the dramatic tension rendered more taut by it, the madness of Ahab enhanced by it.
So, what does make Moby-Dick one of the primary candidates for the title of Great American Novel? A vast majority of the novel doesn't even take place in anything that could legitimately be called "America." But America is somehow there in the same way that it was there when the Stars and Stripes were planted firmly in lunar soil. With the westward expansion nearly complete, the oceans of the world became the next frontier -- the next fresh, unspoiled place for men to spoil, the utter imaginable limits of the empire.
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